J 



TENNYSON 



C3 



]0f ^^ 



Copyright, 1898 

BY 

G. p. PUTNAM'S SONS 

Set up and electrotyped October, 1898. 
Reprinted January, iSgg ; June, igoi ; January, 1902. 



5Mr' 



TCbe 1kntcf<erbocl?er press* mew ]t)orli 



PREFACE. 

IN preparing this volume, I have included, in addi- 
tion to the simple outline of the chief incidents 
in Tennyson's life, a selection of certain critical 
estimates of his work which impressed me as pre- 
senting most accurately his poetic quality with its 
limitations and its tendencies. Among these esti- 
mates are several, translated from French and Ger- 
man sources, which, so far as I know, have not before 
come into print in any of the various books about 
Tennyson. I was so fortunate also as to find in the 
Massachusetts Quarterly a review of The Princess 
by James Russell Lowell. I am indebted to Mr. 
Charles Eliot Norton for an unpublished letter con- 
cerning Tennyson's introduction to this country, 
and I wish to acknowledge the valuable assistance 
rendered in the collection of my material by the 
Librarians of the Brooklyn Mercantile Library and 
of the Brooklyn Historical Library. 

While the result of my somewhat circumscribed 
researches can offer little if anything of original im- 
portance for the Tennyson specialist, I trust that for 
the general reader I have succeeded in giving a 



IV 



IPreface^ 



fair view of the life and work of the Laureate, a view 
possibly somewhat more detached and varied than 
that which may be gained from the official Life or 
from books written during the poet's lifetime. 



E. L C, 



New York, Sept. 15, i 




CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER. PAGE 

i. — somersby and louth .... i 
11. — Cambridge and New Life . . .11 
111. — The Volume of 1832, and "In Mem- 

oriam" 26 

IV.— Maturity 46 

V. — "The Princess," and Parallel Pass- 
ages 74 

VI. — Marriage and Laureateship . . .107 

Vll. — Farringford 132 

Vlll. — " Maud," and the Pre-Raphaelite Illus- 
trations 151 

IX.— The "Idylls of the King" . . .176 
X. — "Enoch Arden," and the Dialect 

Poems 

XL— The Dramas 

XII. — "Twilight and Evening Bell" . 

Xlll. — Echoes 

XIV. — "Contemporary Posterity". 



193 
213 

235 
253 
267 




ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 

By G. F. 


1859 

IVatts, 


R.A. 


Frontispiece 


Page 


Somersby Rectory 


' 


• 


• 


• • • 


2 


Louth 


• 


• 


• 


• • • 


8 


Arthur Hallam 


Prom the bust by Chantrey. 


36 


James Spedding 


By G. F. 


Watts, 


R.A. 


. 


56 


Robert Browning 


From life. 


' 


. 


72 


Lady Tennyson . 


By G. F. 


IVatts, 


R.A. 


. 


108 



The Very Reverend Dr. Jowett . . . .120 

(Master of Balliol, Oxford.) From life. 

Letter from Tennyson to the Publishers of 

''The Westminster Review" . . . 12S 

Reproduction in facsimile. 

Farringford House, Freshwater . . ,132 
Tennyson's Lane, Farringford .... 144 



viii miuetratione* 

Page 

The Very Reverend Dean Bradley . . . 216 

From life. 

Henry Irving 2}o 

(As "Becket'\) From life. 

Letter from Tennyson to W. C, Bennett . . 244 

Reproduced from the original in the British Museum. 

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1888 .... 2^4 

From life. 

George Frederick IVatts, R.A. . . . 268 

From life. 

The Very Reverend Dr. Butler . . . 280 

(Master of Trinity, Cambridge.) From life. 



A portion of these illustrations was reproduced from the following English 
books : Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and His Friends : A series of Portraits in photo- 
gravure from negatives, by Julia Margaret Cameron and H. H. H. Cameron ; The 
Laureate's Country, by Professor Alfred J. Church ; Tennyson and His Pre' 
Raphaelite Illustrators, by George Somes Layard. 




TENNYSON 



CHAPTER I. 
SOMERSBY AND LOUTH. 

ALFRED TENNYSON belongs to the class of 
poets who strike their roots deep into their 
native soil. Not Virgil on the banks of the 
Mincio, or Wordsworth among the English Lakes, 
was more content with the scene at his door ; and 
the Lincolnshire Wolds are interesting to us, as 
readers of Tennyson, less for their curious geologic 
formation and varied history of Roman and Danish 
occupation, than for the place given to their streams 
and trees and village gardens in the poems now 
read throughout the English-speaking world. 

Lincolnshire was long known as a county of 
rabbits, and geese, and sheep ''of whitest lock and 
magnitude of fleece," a county moist enough to 
suggest Herodian's description of the marshy places 
in Britain ''over which the inhabitants will swim 
and walk, though up to the middle in water," but as 
dry now, thanks to an excellent system of drainage, 
as any part of England. The vast stretches of level 
land are richly cultivated, pleasant under the great 
waste of sky, and played upon by the winds. The 



2 zrenn?6om 

Wolds are the chalk hills that run from Spilsby to 
the southern shore of the Humber, and on a lower 
slope of these hills lies the little village of Somersby ; 
*'an agreeable village," as the old guide-books de- 
scribe it, with bowery lanes, a mere handful of in- 
habitants (in 1 82 1 there were 62), a small sandstone 
church about which grows the wall-rue, and a low, 
white Rectory in which on the 6th of August, 1809, 
Alfred Tennyson was born. 

Tennyson's father, the Rev. George Clayton 
Tennyson, held the two benefices of Somersby and 
Bag Enderby. He is described as a man of varied 
interests, something of a poet, something of an 
artist, much of a scholar and linguist, and of power- 
ful physique. His wife was so tender-hearted a lady 
that a story is told of village roughs bringing their 
dogs beneath her window to beat them, knowing 
that she would buy them off from their cruelty.^ 

There were twelve children, eight of them sons, 
and it is not surprising that the Rector was obliged 
to add to his home a large room, which he built, 
after the fashion of ecclesiastical architecture, with 
mediaeval windows. Here the large family were in 
the habit of gathering for evening games. 

The Rectory, now no longer the Rectory, ap- 
proached from Horncastle, stands on the right of 
the road and is separated from it by a narrow drive. 
The place has not been well kept up, and to see it 
as it was with the old garden and the lost view, we 

' Waugh's Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 







(^ 



Somereb? anJ) Xoutb* ^ 

must turn to the *' Ode to Memory " among Tenny- 
son's early poems. There we find 

** a garden bower'd close 



With plaited alleys of the trailing rose, 
Long alleys falling down to twilight grots. 
Or opening upon level plots 
Of crowned lilies, standing near 
Purple-spiked lavender." 

In the same poem we have further glimpses of 
the fair visible world that intruded importunately 
upon the lad's alert consciousness ; of '' woods that 
belt the grey hillside," of the '' seven elms and pop- 
lars four," and "the towering sycamore " behind the 
house, of which group only the elms now remain, 
and of the ''ridged wolds" upon which bleated 
" thick-fieeced sheep" in "wattled folds." The 
flowers in the Rectory garden inspired Tennyson's 
first attempt at poetry, and Mrs. Ritchie's pretty story 
of the boy of five, caught by the strong Lincolnshire 
wind and whirled down the garden path, calling 
out, "I hear a voice that's speaking in the wind," 
has gone the rounds with his biographers. Another 
favourite story connected with his early days is that 
of the visitant owl. Hearing one of these nocturnal 
birds hoot or "snore" outside the window of the 
little gable room in which he studied and wrote, he 
responded with what must have been a clever imita- 
tion of the cry, for the owl flew in, made friends, 
and remained as one of the family. This episode, 
no doubt, inspired the later poem "To the Owl," 



4 ZTennijsom 

which so pleased the fancy of the genial Christopher 
North that he wrote in Blackwood's : '' Alfred is as an 
owl ; all that he wants is to be shot, stuffed, and 
stuck into a glass case, to be made immortal in a 
museum." 

Near the Rectory stands the old '' Manor Farm," 
which in the change of years has been divided into 
labourers' dwellings. This dark old place owed its 
existence to an inexpert architectural mind, and 
furnished the Tennyson children with an admirable 
background for their singular games of joust and 
tournament, and one may easily picture Alfred, 
brown and strong and full of imaginative heat, taking 
much satisfaction in its "embattled parapet"; but 
the story identifying it with the '' Moated Grange," 
the home of weary Mariana, is altogether erroneous. 

Somersby Church, of which Tennyson's father 
was Rector, underwent, in 1833, repairs that must 
have interfered with whatever quaintness the interior 
may have had in earlier days, and quite destroyed 
its atmosphere of delicate age. A fine Gothic win- 
dow in the face of the tower was removed and one 
of crude taste was substituted ; the heavy high 
benches were replaced by new, open seats, and the 
rough uneven flagging gave way to encaustic tiles ; 
in general, a devastating spirit of order prevailed. 
The churchyard has, however, retained its ancient 
charm. The Roman Preaching Cross that stands 
near the porch on the south side of the building has 
escaped not only the ravages of time but the de- 



Somerab? anb Xoutb- 5 

structive tastes of the Commonwealth iconoclasts. 
It is about fifteen feet high with an octagonal shaft, 
and is decorated with a capital from which rises the 
cross, ornamented on its south face with the repre- 
sentation of the Crucifixion, and on the north face 
with the image of the Virgin and Child. Over the 
south porch is a sun-dial with the inscription "Time 
Passeth," and on the north side is a holy-water 
stoup. To the west of the tower is the tomb of the 
poet's father, who died at the early age of fifty-two. 

Not far from the home of the Tennysons is a 
wooded place, unique in the landscape, deep and 
shady and wild, enclosing a well that furnishes the 
name of Holywell Glen. On one of the sandstone 
rocks at the upper end of this glen, the boy wrote 
his famous inscription " Byron is Dead," in his pro- 
found youthful grief, when the news penetrated to 
the Lincolnshire village; for him the ''Byron and 
Bulwer age " began early ! 

At the lower end of the glen flows the Somersby 
brook, cool and dark, but not the stream that 
''comes from haunts of coot and hern" and with 
whose cheerful course we are all familiar. It might 
fairly enough boast of "hazel covers" and "sweet 
forget-me-nots" and "willow-weed and mallow," 
but it could not in honesty refer to " here and there 
a greyling." According to a very careful authority, 
the greyling is not a Lincolnshire fish, and the deli- 
cate verity of Tennyson's habit of mind — so rever- 
enced by some, while others can only "endure to 



6 ^ennuaon. 

be told " of it — would not permit him to launch a 
foreign fish in one of his Lincolnshire brooks.' The 
*' Brook" of which Edmund Aylmer sang is quite 
imaginary, while the little Somersby stream slips 
along in the '* Ode to Memory," 

** the brook that loves 



To purl o'er matted cress and ribbed sand, 
Or dimple in the dark of rushy coves, 
Drawing into his narrow earthern urn 
In every elbow and turn 
The filtered tribute of the rough woodland," 

and shows its graver aspect in the poem beginning 
'' Flow on, cold rivulet, to the sea." 

In 1816, when Tennyson was only seven years 
old, he was sent to Louth, his mother's birthplace, 
and distinguished for a somewhat remarkable gram- 
mar-school in which he studied during four miserable 
years. The early part of the century seems to have 
been a dark period for the little grammar-school boys 
of Great Britain. Carlyle, who was sturdy enough 
about enduring physical hardship, never admired his 
master, and wrote of him, later in life, that ''he knew 
syntax enough, and of the human soul thus much — 
that it had a faculty called memory, and could be 
acted on through the muscular integument by appli- 
ance of birch rods." Edward Irving, who had the 
same master as Carlyle, often had his ears pinched 
until they bled. The Reverend J. Waite, who was 
at the head of the Louth school when Tennyson was 

^ Professor Church's The Laureate's Country. 



Somersb? anb Xoutb* 7 

there, and long afterward, is described as having the 
character ascribed by Horace to his own teacher, 
being plagosus, fond of blows.^ 

Professor Hales, in his lively account of the Louth 
grammar-school,^ writes with bitter humour of the 
conviction of the masters that *' nothing could be 
taught that was not emphasised with the cane," but 
he adds quite pluckily : ''Will it seem inconsistent 
to say that this old grammar-school is dear to my 
memory ? Even the house of bondage may have its 
charms. One may find most pleasant companions 
amongst one's fellow-captives. There may be fair 
views from the windows that inspire forgetfulness 
of the grievances of the interior. The taskmasters 
may be not without amiable features. And after all 
what is a good thrashing now and then if one's 
digestion is satisfactory ! What are all the syntaxes 
of the globe if only one sleeps well o' nights ! Then 
let us consider what excellent endurance our school 
taught us. What splendid training for martyrdom 
or any other suffering it provided ! We should have 
smiled benevolently at the stake, deemed the rack 
absolute repose, after our hardening experience." 

Tennyson himself never rose to the height of this 
philosophy, and though the Louth school did its best 
to honour him in later years, he was not cajoled into 
forgetting that as a child he had hated it. It was 
natural enough that the little school, dull and aus- 

* Professor Church's The Laureate's Country » 

* The Gentleman's Maga:(ine, 1892. 



8 ?i;enni?6on* 

tere, as undoubtedly it was, and situated over a 
sort of almshouse dedicated to the shelter of twelve 
poor women, should have failed to leave jocund im- 
pressions on the mind of a sensitive, dreamy boy ; 
but we will do it the justice to record that it held a 
high place among the schools of Lincolnshire, boast- 
ing the reputation of having educated more scholars 
for the learned professions than any other school in 
the county. Perhaps it justified in this way the in- 
scription on the common-seal of the place : Qiiipar- 
cit virgce odit filium (Who spares the rod spoils the 
child). 

Although Tennyson wasted no affection upon the 
Louth school, the town furnished him with at least 
one moment of pure happiness. In 1827, Charles 
and Alfred Tennyson made a collection of their verses 
— already numerous — under the title Poems by Two 
Brothers, and took the manuscript to Mr. J. Jackson, 
a bookseller of Louth, who published the work and 
paid twenty pounds for the copyright, a piece of 
fortune that seems perhaps more surprising to us than 
it did to the young authors. 

There is a pleasant story that the ''Two Broth- 
ers," on receipt of their money, hired a carriage and 
drove fourteen or fifteen miles over the low hills and 
marshy flats to Marblethorpe, with its sandy tracts 
from which could be seen the " hollow ocean-ridges 
roaring into cataracts." This coast is called by com- 
mon consent tame and uninteresting ; but it is easy 
to imagine the appeal made to a poetic mind by the 



Somerebi? anb Xoutb* 9 

'*wide-wing'd sunset of the misty marsh," by the 
**grey sand-banks " and dreary winds that drive the 
low clouds across the horizon, and by the infinite 
character of the sea. 

This first lucky little volume is, very properly, not 
much dwelt upon by the critics of Tennyson's work. 
The authors wrote deprecatingly : " We have passed 
the Rubicon, and we leave the rest to fate ; though 
its edict may create a fruitless regret that we ever 
emerged from 'the shade 'and courted notoriety." 
Notoriety came only in the shape of a little notice in 
The Literary Chronicle and Weekly Review, and the 
poems did not, certainly, deserve any more striking 
welcome. Taking such lines as these : 

** Memory ! dear enchanter ! 
Why bring back to view 
Dreams of youth, which banter 
All that e'er was true." 

or these : 

** The vices of my life arise, 

Pourtrayed in shapes, alas ! too true. 
And not one beam of hope breaks through 
To cheer my old and aching eyes," 

we can readily concur with Stopford Brooke, who 
finds the boyish verses '* without one trace of origi- 
nality, force, or freshness — faded imitations of previ- 
ous poets, chiefly of Byron ; or, where not imitative, 
full of the futile modesty of boyhood which would 
fain be vain but does not dare, made up partly of 



lo ^enn?9on* 

bald noise and partly of sentimentality, accurately 
true to the type of the English poetry between the 
death of Shelley and the publication of Tennyson's 
volume of 1830."^ 

It was, however, the natural failure of youth, de- 
lighted with the literature of its own day and inquis- 
itive concerning it, without the power of turning life 
into similar treasure. Still ''feeling after" poetry, 
the brothers, Charles and Alfred, went in 1828 to 
Cambridge, to get from its associations and atmos- 
phere, if not from its teachings, much intellectual 
dignity and grace. 

* Stopford Brooke's Tennyson : His Art and %elation to Modern Life. 




CHAPTER II. 
CAMBRIDGE AND NEW LIFE. 

FOR reasons not altogether difficult of compre- 
hension, Cambridge University has not been 
able to command a scrupulous devotion from 
its poets. Milton, early in the seventeenth century, 
described it as ''a place quite incompatible w^ith the 
votaries of Phoebus," and found himself so irresisti- 
bly in opposition to it that he was irritated even by 
the aspect of the innocent fields in its neighbour- 
hood ; fields on which, later, his '' idle orbs " would 
fain have looked. Dryden, in his Prologue to the 
University of Oxford, let no formal loyalty to his own 
University restrain him, while Gray, who was both 
pupil and professor at Cambridge in the middle years 
of the eighteenth century, went so far as to say : 
''Surely it was of this place, now Cambridge, but 
formerly known by the name of Babylon, that the 
prophet spoke when he said : ' But wild beasts of 
the desert shall lie there ; and their houses shall be 
full of doleful creatures ; and owls shall dwell there, 
and satyrs shall dance there. ' " ^ Byron, whose name 

* Isaiah xiii., 21. 
II 



12 



^ennp6on, 



was still fresh in Trinity College when Tennyson 
went there, wrote in 1807 : ''This place is wretched 
enough — a villainous chaos of din and drunkenness, 
nothing but hazard and Burgundy, mathematics and 
Newmarket, riot and racing" ; and in 1808 : ''Were 
reasoning, eloquence, or virtue the object of my 
search, Granta is not their metropolis, nor is the place 
of her situation an El Dorado, far less an Utopia. 
The intellects of her children are as stagnant as her 
Cam ; and their pursuits limited to the church, not 
of Christ, but of the nearest benefice." 

It was then a natural sequence that Tennyson 
should have been at least indifferent to Cambridge as 
it was before the middle of the present century. 
Mathematics held possession of the place and were 
by no means pursued with the imagination and 
breadth of vision that, one may think, should have 
been awakened daily by the noble statue in the ante- 
chapel of Newton 

" with his prism and silent face ; 



The marble index of mind forever 

Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone." 

The teaching was undoubtedly technical and sterile, 
tormal and seldom illuminating. Only since 1822 
had there been an annual voluntary classical exami- 
nation, and the condition imposed on all candidates 
was that they should have obtained an honour at 
the mathematical examination of the preceding Jan- 
uary. 
The social life, moreover, was not harmoniously 



Cambri59e anb IRew Xife. 13 

blent. As far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries there had been more opportunities for 
sympathy between tutor and pupil ; but as the 
numbers increased, the older men ceased to share 
their rooms with the undergraduates, ceremony and 
artificiality crept in, and these opportunities were 
curtailed. A spirit of ''donnishness," incompatible 
with the finer essence of social intercourse, prevailed, 
and, doubtless, there was much extravagance and 
recklessness of living, although it may not have been 
so wild a spirit as dominated Oxford when Ruskin, 
at his first college supper, helped to carry away four 
fellow-students, ''one of them the son of the head of 
a college, head-foremost, down-stairs and home." 

Still there was the quickening influence of many 
men of many minds, and concerning this we can 
hardly do better than quote Carlyle's words on the 
side of Cambridge ; always the old Cambridge, be it 
remembered, before the leaven of modernity had 
begun to work. He writes : 

" One benefit not to be dissevered from the most 
obsolete University still frequented by young, ingenu- 
ous, living souls, is that of manifold collision and com- 
munication with the said young souls ; which, to 
everyone of these coevals, is undoubtedly the most 
important branch of breeding for him. In this point, 
as the learned Huber has insisted, the two English 
Universities, their studies otherwise being granted 
to be nearly useless, and even ill done of their kind, 
—far excel all other Universities : so valuable are the 



14 ^ennpaon, 

rules of human behaviour which from of old have 
tacitly established themselves there ; so manful, with 
all its sad drawbacks, is the style of English char- 
acter, 'frank, simple, rugged, and yet courteous,' 
which has tacitly but imperatively got itself sanc- 
tioned and prescribed there. Such, in full sight of 
Continental and other Universities, is Huber's opinion. 
. . . Another judge in whom 1 have confidence, 
declares further : That of these two Universities, 
Cambridge is decidedly the more Catholic (not 
Roman Catholic but Human Catholic) in its tenden- 
cies and habitudes ; and that, in fact, of all the miser- 
able Schools and High Schools in the England of 
these years, he, if reduced to choose from them, 
would choose Cambridge as a place of culture for the 
young idea."^ 

Walter Bagehot had the same idea in estimating the 
value of college life. ''Take an uncollegiate English- 
man," he says, "and you will generally find that he 
has no friends : he has not the habit " ; and he adds : 
" The real plastic energy is not in tutors or lectures or 
in books 'got up,' but in Wordsworth and Shelley ; 
in the books that all read because all like, in what 
all talk of because all are interested, in the argument- 
ative walk or disputatious lounge." This was pre- 
cisely the debt that Tennyson owed to Cambridge, 
and one that he amply acknowledged in the very 
permanence and strength of the associations he 
formed there. 

' Carlyle's Life of John Sterling. 



Cambrl&ae anb mew Xife* 15 

Charles and Alfred Tennyson lodged together first 
at Rose Crescent, and afterwards in Trumpington 
Street. They are said to have been shy and taciturn 
lads, and for a moment they hesitated at the thresh- 
old of the untried world. But they were not long 
in finding their special circle, and it is interesting to 
know that Thackeray, in the same college at the 
same time, was apparently not included in it. We 
learn somewhat vaguely from In Memoriam of the 
little band that held debate 

** on mind and art 



And labour and the changing mart 
And all the framework of the land. 

When one would aim an arrow fair 
But send it slackly from the string, 
And one would pierce an outer ring 

And one an inner, here and there." 

These were the ''Twelve Apostles "as they were 
called, an association started in 1820, and limited to 
twelve members. The group may have been, as 
Mr. Swinburne has said, "very plausibly definable 
by nameless curs of letters as a ' mutual admiration 
society ' artificially heated by the steam of reciprocal 
incense for the incubation of ' coterie glory ' "^ ; but 
there must have been something of real worth in the 
ardent speculation and discussion that took place 
among such men as Richard Trench (afterwards 
Archbishop of Dublin), Richard Milnes (afterwards 
Lord Houghton), the humorous Brookfield, Thack- 

V 

' See article on " Tennyson and Musset." 



1 6 zrennuaon* 

eray's friend, Spedding, Sterling, and the rest. There 
was enough intellectual activity among them, at all 
events, and a story is told of them that reflects almost 
beyond credence upon the literary '' atmosphere " of 
Oxford at that time. A deputation was sent by the 
Cambridge Union, a literary club then recently organ- 
ised, to the corresponding society at Oxford, to main- 
tain the proposition that Shelley was a greater poet 
than Byron. Milnes, who was one of the represent- 
atives of Cambridge, writes of the expedition : 

''The contrast from our lounging, shuffling, scrap- 
ing, talking, ridiculous kind of assembly to a neat 
little square room, with eighty or ninety young gen- 
tlemen sprucely dressed, sitting on chairs or lounging 
about the fireplace, was enough to unnerve a more 
confident person than myself. Even the brazen Sun- 
derland was somewhat awed and became tautologi- 
cal, and spake what we should call an inferior speech, 
but which dazzled his hearers. Hallam, as being 
among old friends, was bold and spake well. I was 
certainly nervous, but, 1 think, pleased my audience 
better than I pleased myself." The spruce young 
gentlemen proved to be "wretched speakers," and 
some of them believed that Shenstone was the poet 
under discussion, and said they knew but one poem 
by him, the one beginning 

'* My banks are all furnished with bees." ' 

The " Old Man of Highgate " was casting his pale 

^See Life of Lord Houghton by Wemyss Reid. 



Cambribge an& IRew Xife* 17 

metaphysical light over Cambridge at that moment, 
and Wordsworth was in possession of his fame. 
There was, too, a spirit stirring toward religious 
and social awakening. Newman at Oxford, Maurice 
at Cambridge, had ruffled the smooth surface of con- 
ventional thought in the two Universities ; and Mau- 
rice, struggling with the eternal verities against the 
influence of what we may call a dogmatically liberal 
training, and pouring out eloquence that had slowly 
gathered intensity in the frightened silence of his 
home life, was a magical leader for the young 
''Apostles" of Tennyson's circle. Out of their fer- 
vour and disputation a certain amount of character 
was bound to develop, and Carlyle's glowing pic- 
ture of the young Sterling may stand as the type of 
them all : 

'' a young, ardent soul looking with hope and 

joy into a world which was infinitely beautiful to 
him, though overhung with falsities and foul cob- 
webs as world never was before ; overloaded, over- 
clouded, to the zenith and nadir of it, by incredible 
uncredited traditions, solemnly sordid hypocrisies, 
and beggarly deliriums old and new ; which latter 
class of objects it was clearly the part of every noble 
heart to expend all its lightnings and energies in 
burning up without delay, and sweeping into their 
native Chaos out of such a Cosmos as this. Which 
process it did not then seem to him could be very 
difficult ; or attended with much other than heroic 
joy and enthusiasm of victory or of battle to the 



1 8 ZEenn^eon. 

gallant operator, in his part of it. This was, with 
modifications such as might be, the humour and 
creed of College Radicalism five and twenty years 
ago/ Rather horrible at that time, seen to be not so 
horrible now, at least to have grown very universal, 
and to need no concealment now. The natural hu- 
mour and attitude, we may well regret to say, — and 
honourable, not dishonourable, for a brave young 
soul such as Sterling's in those years in those local- 
ities." 

Tennyson, it would seem, was not so disputa- 
tious nor so fiery as many of his companions ; he 
had always about him a saving — when not blighting 
— grace of common-sense. The Reverend Stopford 
Brooke takes him to task for this,^ finding his theo- 
ries of patriotism, progress, and so forth, unpoetic, and 
wishing he had taken ''the side of the rushers, of 
the enthusiastic seekers, of the wild warriors, of the 
sacrificers whom the world calls insane," of the in- 
dignant men whose speech and action he thought 
were ''blind hysterics of the Celt." One episode of 
his youth, however, shows him deeply moved by 
the necessities and sufferings of his human kind. 
Carlyle speaks of certain weary groups of Spanish 
exiles, "stately, tragic figures, in proud threadbare 
cloaks," pacing Euston Square in London during the 
winter of 1 829-30. These were the political refugees, 
awaiting their chance to overthrow the Government 

• Written in 1 85 1 . 

' Tennyson : His Art and T^elation to Modern Life. 



Cambribge anb 1Rew Xife* 19 

of Ferdinand VII., and hanging upon the counsel of 
the revolutionist, General Torrijos. The youth of 
England, or at all events the youth of Cambridge, 
impelled by fire and pity, made various attempts 
to help them, and the two friends, Arthur Hallam 
and Alfred Tennyson, went to the aid of certain 
refugees in hiding near the Pyrenees border. Very 
little information concerning this expedition, with its 
bravery of letters written in concealed ink and 
money donated to the '' Cause," has reached us ; but 
it was probably its own reward, University life sel- 
dom providing for young exuberance an outlet at 
once so romantic and so virtuous. 

Meanwhile, Tennyson was steadily developing 
his poetic talent. At twenty there is time for every- 
thing, and discussions, theatricals, not impossibly 
mathematics, were sooner neglected than the one 
absorbing occupation. The subject for the Chan- 
cellor's Prize Poem in 1829 was ''Timbuctoo" — not 
very inspiring to the modern mind. Tennyson's 
father thought that his son's poetic faculty might 
here be turned to good account, and urged him to 
compete ; and he did so, apparently in a spirit of 
reckless indifference, as, in place of preparing a 
new poem, he furbished up an old one written in 
blank verse instead of in the orthodox heroic couplet, 
and sent it in. The result was quite a surprising 
success, the poem containing fine lines and spirited 
imagery, and Tennyson was awarded the medal over 
worthy competitors, of whom Hallam was one. 



20 ^ennij6on* 

Milnes wrote to his father concerning it: ''Tenny- 
son's poem has made quite a sensation ; it is certainly 
equal to most parts of Milton ! " 

A curious story attributes to Thackeray a parody 
on this prize poem containing these alluring lines : 

*' In Africa — a quarter of the world — 
Men's skins are black, their hair is crisped and curled, 
And somewhere there, unknown to public view, 
A mighty city lies, called Timbuctoo." 

Mr. Arthur Waugh very sensibly decides against the 
theory of parody on Thackeray's part, suggesting 
that he made merely a comic effort on the theme 
given out. 

Beside ''Timbuctoo," which did not, it is con- 
ceivable, deeply engage the poet's mind, Tennyson 
was hard at work upon his own themes. At night 
in his room he "crooned out his mellifluous music" 
to his friends, and, in 1830, he was ready for a wider 
public with a thin volume of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical. 
It was a noticeable flight, and gave contemporary 
critics some interesting work to do, for which they 
were obviously grateful. The Westminster Review 
devoted a number of pages to a grave and what now 
seems a pompous explanation of the virtues of the 
poems, and the dangers that lay in wait for their 
author. The reviewer, said to be John Stuart Mill, 
soliloquises as follows : 

"A genuine poet has deep responsibilities to his 
country and the world, to the present and future gen- 
erations, to earth and heaven. He of all men should 



Cambribge anb IRew %ifc. 21 

have distinct and worthy objects before him, and con- 
secrate himself to their promotion. It is thus that he 
best consults the glory of his art and his own lasting 
fame. Mr. Tennyson has a dangerous quality in that 
facility of impersonation on which we have remarked, 
and by which he enters so thoroughly into the most 
strange and wayward idiosyncrasies of other men. 

'' It must not degrade him into a poetical harlequin. 
He has higher work to do than that of disporting him- 
self amongst 'mystics' and 'flowing philosophers.' 
He knows that ' the Poet's mind is holy ground ' ; he 
knows that the poet's portion is to be 

' Dower'd with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, 
The love of love ' ; 

he has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his 
own just conception of the grandeur of a poet's des- 
tiny ; and we look to him for its fulfilment. It is not 
for such men to sink into mere verse-makers for the 
amusement of themselves or others. They can in- 
fluence the associations of unnumbered hearts ; they 
can disseminate principles ; they can give those prin- 
ciples power over men's imaginations ; they can ex- 
cite in a good cause the sustained enthusiasm that is 
sure to conquer ; they can blast the laurels of the ty- 
rants and hallow the memories of the martyrs of pa- 
triotism ; they can act with a force, the extent of 
which it is difficult to estimate, upon national feel- 
ings and character, and consequently upon national 
happiness." If the author of this criticism had known 



22 trenn^eon. 

that he was impressing upon a future laureate the 
dignity of his office, the warning could hardly have 
been more strenuous. 

In The Englishman's Maga:(ine, Arthur Hallani 
made a discriminating as well as appreciative esti- 
mate of the book. He found in it luxuriance of 
imagination held in control, a power of embodying 
self in character or moods of character, a picturesque 
delineation of objects, and the skill to hold them 
'' fused in a medium of strong emotion," a variety of 
lyrical measures, and an elevated habit of thought ; 
and he concluded with a very characteristic defence 
of Tennyson's selection of words : 

''The language of the book," he wrote, ''with 
one or two exceptions, is thorough and sterling 
English. A little more respect, perhaps, was due to 
the 'jus et norma loquendi,' but we are inclined to 
consider as venial a fault arising from generous en- 
thusiasm for the principles of sound analogy and for 
that Saxon element which constitutes the intrinsic 
freedom and nervousness of our native tongue. We 
see no signs in what Mr. Tennyson has written of 
the Quixotic spirit which has led some persons to 
desire the reduction of English to a single form by 
excluding nearly the whole of Latin and Roman de- 
rivatives. Ours is necessarily a compound language ; 
as such alone it can flourish and increase, nor will 
the author of the poems we have extracted be likely 
to barter for a barren appearance of symmetrical 
structure that fertility of expression and variety of 



(Tambri&ge anb IRew Xife^ 23 

harmony which ' the speech that Shakespeare spoke ' 
derived from the sources of southern phraseology." 
It was good criticism for a lad of nineteen, and in 
itself too good to warrant the very amusing attack 
from " Christopher North " in Blackwood's. '* Fusty 
Christopher," as Tennyson afterwards called him, had 
little sympathy with expansive admiration on the 
part of any critic, and he delighted to declare that 
Hallam's article had sent The Englishman's Maga:{ine 
to its early grave ; while his condemnation of the 
Westminster article will serve to show the present 
generation how little restraint was demanded of re- 
viewers in the early years of the century : 

'Mt [the Westminster article] is a perfect speci- 
men," he wrote, ''of the super-hyperbolical ul- 
tra-extravagance of outrageous Cockney eulogistic 
foolishness, with which not even a quantity of com- 
mon-sense less than nothing has been suffered for 
an indivisible moment of time to mingle, the purest 
mere matter of moonshine ever mouthed by an idiot- 
lunatic slavering in the palsied dotage of the extrem- 
est super-annuation ever inflicted on a being long 
ago, perhaps, in some slight respects and low degrees 
human, but now sensibly and audibly reduced below 
the level of the Pongoes. " This phenomenal passage 
is a fine example of the ''shallow head and restless 
temper" in the "numerous host" of reviewers so 
much despised by Coleridge ; but " Christopher " was 
not so rash as to conclude his paper without disclos- 
ing his actual attitude toward the young poet : 



24 ^enn?0om 

''Perhaps in the first part of the article," he 
admitted, ''we may have exaggerated Mr. Tenny- 
son's not unfrequent silliness, for we are apt to be 
carried away by the whim of the moment, and in 
our humorous moods many things wear a queer look 
to our aged eyes which fill young pupils with tears ; 
but we feel assured that in the second part we have 
not exaggerated his strength, that we have done no 
more than justice to his fine faculties, and that the 
millions who delight in Maga will with one voice 
confirm our judgment that Alfred Tennyson is a 
poet." 

When we consider that he v/as at this time only 
twenty-one, that his natural bent was toward a style 
demanding infinite patience and training, and that 
Wordsworth had risen, pure and luminous, above 
the level horizon of literature, a very trying star for 
lesser lights to shine against, we may decide that 
Tennyson was faring well among his friends and foes. 

The greatest of these friends, as the world well 
knows, was Arthur Henry Hallam, a learned boy, a 
year and a half Tennyson's junior, already a traveller 
when the two met at Cambridge, much read in 
poetry and philosophy, and careless of mathematics. 
His nature, vigorous and bright, his kindliness of 
temper, and the generosity of his affections won 
him the exuberant love that seems to belong to those 
who die young. Physically he was delicate, but in 
spirit indomitable— as one would know almost in 
advance, so often is the mystery repeated. 



CambrlbQC an& IRew life* 25 

In him Tennyson found the charm that others 
found, with something more compelling, an attrac- 
tion that made their friendship singular, and equal 
to the great friendships of the earlier world. Curi- 
ously pertinent to it, in fact, is this — Montaigne's 
description of his own perfect ''inviolate" intimacy 
with Estienne La Boetie : '' Having so short a time 
to endure, and having so late begun (for we were 
both men grown, and he by several years), it had no 
time to lose, nor could it be built upon the model of 
regular and feeble friendships, for which is needed 
such precaution of long and previous conversation." 
And we may venture even a little farther along the 
dangerous parallel, to quote in its fitness to Tenny- 
son's experience one other passage from Montaigne's 
threnody, — so touching as one comes upon it, rising 
and falling like music overcome by coarser sound, 
through the cynicism of many pages : 

'' For in truth if I compare all the rest of my life, 
which by the grace of God I have passed pleasantly, 
comfortably, and, excepting the loss of such a friend, 
exempt from weighty affliction, full of tranquillity of 
mind, having taken in payment my natural and origi- 
nal commodities without seeking others ; if I com- 
pare all this, I say, to the four years that it was 
given me to enjoy the gentle companionship and 
society of this person, all is as smoke, as a dark and 
weary night. There is no action or imagination in 
which 1 do not miss him, as he would also have 
missed me, for just as he surpassed by infinite de- 



26 Zi;enn?6on» 

grees in all other virtue and sufficiency, so would he 
in the exercise of friendship." Such, also, was the 
intimacy between Hallam and Tennyson ; and from 
the long lament of In Memoriam we learn how 
this personal relation deepened and made beautiful 
all the associations with Cambridge and with Som- 
ersby where Hallam visited the Tennysons and 
became the lover of Emily Tennyson, and where, in 
the shadowy garden, he 

" shook to all the liberal air 

The dust and din and steam of town ; 

and 



i 



lay and read 

The Tuscan poets on the lawn.' 




CHAPTER III. 
THE VOLUME OF 1832, AND In Memoriam. 

TENNYSON, called from Cambridge by his fath- 
er's illness, which resulted in death, went 
back to Somersby in 183 1. He had not, of 
course, taken his degree, but a degree seems not to 
have been regarded as a matter of much importance 
by the Cambridge students of the time. The sepa- 
ration from his congenial friends was probably much 
harder to bear. We hear of the leave-taking cele- 
brated by a dance, and of the youth driving away in 
the light of the street lamps, and looking back to 
catch a last glimpse of the handsome face of one of 
his comrades. Later there were frequent letters and 
visits from the various ''Apostles" who kept him in- 
formed of their pre-occupations. The Tennyson 
family continued to occupy the Somersby Rectory un- 
til 1837, and there was plenty of opportunity for life 
in the open air, at all events, and for the study of 
nature. 

We can imagine Tennyson, often with Hallam 
for a companion, taking his long walks over the wold 

after the wholesome fashion of athletic young Eng- 

27 



28 zrenn?6on» 

lishmen, or loafing along the brookside like Landor^ 
" meditating native rhymes," or amusing his friends 
with the performance of herculean feats of strength. 
There were also occasional visits to London, where 
he and Hallam rambled about among the aesthetic 
sights of the great town. 

Under these influences, favourable enough to po- 
etic production of a gentle kind, he made up the vol- 
ume which was published in December, 1832, and is 
known as the 1833 volume. It contained very much 
the sort of poetry one might look for from a nature 
inclined toward reflection and dwelling aloof from the 
stir of towns. Mr. Stedman, in his Victorian Poets, 
says of it : " All in all a more original and beautiful 
volume of minor poetry never was added to our lit- 
erature. . . . Even if these lyrics and idyls had 
expressed nothing, they were of priceless value as 
guides to the renaissance of beauty. Thenceforward 
slovenly work was impossible, subject to instant re- 
buke by contrast. The force of metrical elegance 
made its way and carried everything before it. " This 
is high praise, and might not be accepted by Mr. 
Swinburne, who has said of Tennyson's first period 
that it contains whole poems ''which are no more 
properly to be called metrical than the more shapeless 
and monstrous parts of Walt Whitman, which are 
lineally derived as to their form — if form that can be 
called where form is none — from the vilest example 
set by Cowley, when English verse was first infected 
and convulsed by the detestable duncery of sham 



Zhc IDoIume of 1832* 29 

Pindarics," adding: ''At times, of course, his song 
was then as sweet as ever it has sounded since ; but 
he could never make sure of singing right for more 
than a few minutes or stanzas." 

Nevertheless, the thirty poems, written with a 
natural fineness and grace that dropped easily into 
weakness, showed very unusual sensitiveness to 
pleasant sounds and visions. The flight of birds, 
swallow and rook, the grasses on the wold, the 
chalky hills, the rich sentiment of the Lincolnshire 
landscape, were reproduced as they could have been 
only in the first delight of artistic creation, with 
eager spontaneity. And, like any lad, he sounded 
all the notes he knew. ''The Palace of Art " was his 
introduction to the problem poem, and claimed the 
attention of his fellow-Englishmen, who discussed it 
seriously. It does not seem an over-bold excursion 
into speculative thought ; the poet conceived the 
idea of building for his soul, which he endows with 
personality, a "lordly pleasure-house" filled with 
everything to please intellectual and aesthetic tastes, 
in which the arrogant tenant may dwell apart to con- 
template and to enjoy. When "four years were 
wholly finished " she wearied of such surroundings 
and turned back to humanity : 

*' ' Make me a cottage in the vale,' she said, 
* Where I may mourn and pray.' " 

John Sterling, "that remarkable soul who fash- 
ioned himself eagerly by whatsoever of noble pre- 



30 ZTennpeon* 

sented itself," found this philosophy untrustworthy : 
*'The writer's doctrine seems to be," he wrote, 
** that the soul, while by its own energy surrounding 
itself with the most beautiful and expressive images 
that the history of mankind has produced, and sym- 
pathising wholly with the world's best thoughts, is 
perpetrating some prodigious moral offence for which 
it is bound to repent in sackcloth and ashes. A more 
rational and not less religious view would seem to 
be that we should repent of the errors we commit 
from the inactivity of our higher powers and feelings." 
Other critics found the very obvious moral appropri- 
ate to the intellectual pride of the age, and Stopford 
Brooke reflects, discriminatingly, that it is *'a good 
subject for an essay or a sermon, but as the subject 
of a poem it must first be filled with human passion, 
and secondly it must be ornamented with lovely 
images," and he adds : '' Passion is given to it by 
Tennyson by making the soul a person who goes 
through pride to dreadful pain and through pain into 
repentance. Beauty is given to it by the description 
of the palace which embodies all the various arts and 
wisdom of the world in imaginative symbolism. 
And surely no more superb and lovely house was 
ever built by the wit of man." Attractive the house 
certainly is, with its swinging bells and mosaic floors, 
its courts, and fountains, and tapestries. It is, hov/- 
ever, a fine example of Tennyson's reluctance to 
leave anything to the reader's imagination. Bayne 
very pertinently calls attention to the contrast be- 



Zbc IDoIume of 1832. 31 

tween Poe's description of a palace and Tennyson's/ 
Poe wrote, vaguely and with his own charm : 

" In the greenest of our valleys 
By good angels tenanted, 
Once a fair and stately palace, 
Radiant palace, reared its head. 

In the monarch Thought's dominion 

It stood there. 

Never seraph spread a pinion 

Over fabric half so fair. 

Banners yellow, glorious, golden, 

On the roof did float and flow." 

This leaves the reader to dream almost as he will of 
the house in the green valley. If he admits the 
floating flags he may arrange the rest to suit his 
fancy. But Tennyson will have no one's palace but 
his own. He visualises every detail and makes what 
profanely has been called a ''catalogue raisonnee " 
of the contents. '' If you paint it, you must be care- 
ful," Bayne declares ; '' if you painted it a hundred 
times, you would be constrained to make the great 
features the same." 

Another significant poem in the collection of 1832 
was ''The Lady ofShalott," in which Tennyson found 
his entrance to the Arthurian legend and gave free 
indulgence to his fondness for pictorial words and 
phrases. In it the little breezes " dusk and shiver," 
and the lady floats among " willowy hills and fields," 
while Launcelot rides like " a bearded meteor, trail- 

' Chapter on " Tennyson and his Teachers " in Bayne's Essays in Biography 
and Criticism. 



32 ^enni?6on- 

ing light," a true herald of the coming of Arthur. 
Then we have ''The Miller's Daughter," a pastoral 
picture of soft slopes, and sunshine on the banks of 
the stream, and rural life. The Reverend Stopford 
Brooke says of the love story involved : '' This was 
the sort of love for which Tennyson cared, for which 
Byron and Shelley did not care, which was not in 
the world where Keats lived at all, — but which was 
in Wordsworth's world, and which, after all our ex- 
cursions into phases of passion, is not only the deep- 
est and highest of the affections, but the father and 
mother of all other loves on earth." However 
much or little we may concede this father- and 
motherhood, Tennyson certainly gave to the passion 
of the humble a natural dignity and beauty that 
made it a very fit subject for his poetry, and one in 
the treatment of which he continued to be singularly 
felicitous. Some one has said that his country girls 
are all English ladies transferred from the hall to the 
cottage ; but his gentle chivalry toward these could 
ill be spared from our poetry. 

Among these poems of promise were interpolated 
certain boyish verses that strike one as does an awk- 
ward attitude in a stripling. Such are the lines on 
''The Little Room," which gave to caustic reviewers 
delicious opportunity, but which Hallam in his 
friendliness found " mighty pleasant." 

The volume met with a moderately favourable 
reception. The British world was ready for its me- 
lodious placidity, after the turbulence of Byron, the 



TEbe IDoIume of 1832- 33 

remoteness of Keats and Shelley, and the exigent 
asceticism of Wordsworth. The new poet was not 
disturbing, he had no pagan views, no rebellious 
sentiments ; he was pre-eminently an English gentle- 
man with the qualities that England loves. His 
women, if somewhat shadowy, were fair and win- 
ning ; his imagery was luxuriant and suggested a 
well-fed mind ; his landscape was the lovely English 
landscape, filled with homes and dewy pastures and 
full-foliaged trees. Nevertheless, he was not to be 
accepted without rebuff. There were charges of 
affectation, overquaintness, and mannerism ''bleated 
down the ranks of the innocent ' sillie ' critics as they 
went, one after another, to water. "^ Certain later 
critics who have drunk at other fountains have 
''bleated" on the same notes, and with a curious 
sound of wisdom ; but the early reviewers, to whom 
a young poet was fair game, had, some of them, 
little mercy and much rough wit. The critic of The 
Quarterly Review, presumably Lockhart, was the 
most virulent of all, and let his poisoned arrows fly 
with malicious delight. It must be confessed that 
they were cleverly aimed, although he was both un- 
just and insulting in his method of attack. His style 
may be seen from this treatment of a poem which 
he describes as "a kind of testamentary paper ad- 
dressed ' To ' 

' Then let wise Nature work her will, 
And on my clay her darnels grow, 

* Richard Hengist Home in A New Spirit of the Age. 



34 ^enn?6on» 

Come only when the days are still, 
And at my headstone whisper low, 
And tell me ' 

''Now what would an ordinary bard wish to be 
told under such circumstances ? Why, perhaps, 
how his sweetheart was, or his child, or his family, 
or how the Reform Bill worked, or whether the last 
edition of the poems had been sold— papae 1 Our 
genuine poet's first wish is 

' And tell me — // the woodbines blow I ' 

When, indeed, he shall have been thus satisfied as 
to the woodbines (of the blowing of which in their 
due season he may, we think, feel pretty sure) he 
turns a passing thought to his friend and another to 
his mother 

* If thou art blest, my mother's smile 
Undimmed ' 

But such inquiries, short as they are, seem too 
commonplace, and he immediately glides back into 
his curiosity as to the state of the weather and the 
forwardness of the spring. 

' If thou art blest, my mother's smile 
Undimmed — if bees are on the wing}' 

No, we believe the whole circle of poetry does not 
furnish such another instance of enthusiasm for the 
sights and sounds of the vernal season ! " This was 
criticism in the days of The Qiiarterly Review, and it 
is plain that a poet needed all the friendly enthusiasm 
of his friends to keep his spirits from sinking. 



ft 



Hn flDemoriam/' 35 



In 1833, Tennyson came full upon tragedy. His 
friendship with Hallam had ripened in deep sincerity 
and was enjoyed by both with undiminished fresh- 
ness until Hallam was taken abroad in the summer 
of this year to recover his slight store of natural 
strength after a tedious illness. On the journey from 
Pesth to Vienna, a wet day gave rise to a threatening 
of intermittent fever, and with this meagre warning 
he was found apparently asleep upon a sofa, but in 
reality quite dead. His body was brought back to 
England and taken to the Church of Clevedon, a 
Somersetshire village near Bristol. There it was 
placed in a vault in the transept, on the west wall 
of which is a tablet with this touching inscription : 

TO THE MEMORY OF 

ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM, 

OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, B.A., 
ELDEST SON OF HENRY HALLAM, ESaUIRE, 

AND OF JULIA MARIA HIS WIFE, 

DAUGHTER OF SIR ABRAHAM ELTON, BART., 

OF CLEVEDON COURT, 

WHO WAS SNATCHED AWAY BY SUDDEN DEATH 

AT VIENNA, ON SEPT. I ^TH, 1 833, 

IN THE 23RD YEAR OF HIS AGE. 

AND NOW IN THIS OBSCURE AND SOLITARY CHURCH 

REPOSE THE MORTAL REMAINS OF 

ONE TOO EARLY LOST FOR PUBLIC FAME, 

BUT ALREADY CONSPICUOUS AMONG HIS CONTEMPORARIES 

FOR THE BRIGHTNESS OF HIS GENIUS, 

THE DEPTH OF HIS UNDERSTANDING, 

THE NOBLENESS OF HIS DISPOSITION, 

THE FERVOUR OF HIS PIETY, 

AND THE PURITY OF HIS LIFE. 

VALE DULCISSIME 

VALE DILECTISSIME, DESIDERATISSIME, 

REQUIESCAS IN PACE, 

PATER AC MATER POSTHAC REQUIESCAMUS TECUM 

USQUE AD TUBAM. 



36 ?renn?0om 

This was the tablet of which Tennyson wrote : 

** When on my bed the moonlight falls, 
I know that in thy place of rest 
By that broad water of the west 
There comes a glory on the walls: 

Thy marble bright in dark appears, 

As slowly steals a silver flame 

Along the letters of thy name 
And o'er the number of thy years." 

Stopford Brooke, visiting thirty years ago the lit- 
tle church where Hallam rests, writes of it : ''It was 
then a lonely, quiet place, in a furrow of the sandy 
slopes, not a house standing near it ; and fifty yards 
from it, but hidden from view, the broad estuary of 
the Severn filled with the tide. 1 heard the water wash 
the feet of the low cliffs as it passed by. Sorrow 
and death, peace that passeth understanding, the 
victory of the soul, seemed present with me ; and 
the murmuring of the Severn became, as I dreamed, 
the music of eternal love, into whose vast harmonies 
all our discords are drawn at last." 

It was Tennyson's habit of mind to feel seriously, 
and it is not difficult to imagine the overwhelming 
effect upon him of such a loss. Where he had been 
before concerned with little else than lovely words 
and chosen metres, he was now interrogating the 
universe for an explanation of the inexplicable mys- 
tery. For a time he thought he could no longer 
write, the sympathy upon which he had been so 
richly nourished being withdrawn, but from the con- 




Arthur Hallam. 

From the bust by Chantrey. 



u 



Hn flDemoriam/' 37 



tradiction of this mood resulted In Memoriam. 
The elegy was early in his mind, and though it lay 
there for seventeen years, a treasure too sacred to be 
shown until he had spent upon it all the art he knew, 
it belongs essentially to this period of his life, and 
we may interrupt the sequence of dates to consider 
it here. 

Although more than any other poem that Tenny- 
son wrote it has moved hearts, it has been, perhaps, 
more severely attacked than any other. The word 
passionless has often been applied to it, and it has 
been said that grief which could so pour itself out 
was not so much grief as a calm regret. M. Taine, 
applying to it his severe and alien standard of criticism, 
finds it ''cold and monotonous and too daintily ar- 
ranged." The poet, he says, ''goes into mourning, 
but like a very correct gentleman with perfectly new 
gloves, who dries his tears with a cambric handker- 
chief, and during the religious service which ends 
the ceremony, manifests all the grief of a respectful 
and well-trained layman." Mr. Stedman attributes 
the harshness of this criticism to M. Taine's inability 
to feel the spirit of such a poem through the unfamil- 
iar medium of the English language, and Mr. Swin- 
burne says that M. Taine gave proof "that as far as 
daring is concerned his motto might be Strafford's 
word 'Thorough,' when he struck with the sharp 
point of his lance ' the spotless shield ' which bears 
inscribed the words In Memoriam. His impeach- 
ment of Lord Tennyson's great monumental poem 



38 Ilenn^eon. 

. . . may be classed for perfection of infelicity with 
Jeffrey's selection of the finest lines in Wordsworth's 
finest ode for especially contemptuous assault on the 
simple charge of sheer nonsense." Mr. Swinburne's 
own decidedly frank criticism of the Laureate of 
his country follows hard upon. Referring to ''the 
pretentiously unpretentious philosophy of the book," 
he continues : *' Lord Tennyson is so ostentatious of 
his modesty, so unsparing in his reserve, so inces- 
sant and obtrusive in his disclaimer of all ambition to 
rank as a thinker or a teacher, while returning again 
and yet again to the charge as an ethical apostle or a 
sentimental theosophist, that we are almost reminded 
of the philosopher whose vociferous laudation of the 
dumb, and ear-splitting inculcation of silence, might 
seem to all half-deafened hearers enough to ' crack his 
lungs and split his brazen pipe ' — if possibly such a 
thing might have been possible. 1 trust it may be 
held allowable and compatible with loyalty to ob- 
serve that it is hardly reasonable to touch repeatedly 
and with obvious earnestness on the gravest and 
the deepest questions of life and death, of human 
affection and mortal bereavement — to pour forth page 
upon page of passionate speculation, of love and 
fear and hope and doubt and belief, and then to turn 
round on the student to whose sympathy the book 
— if there be any reason whatever for its existence or 
publication — must surely be supposed to appeal, 
with the surely astonishing protest that it does not 
pretend to grapple with the questions on which it 



''Iln flDemorlam/' 39 

harps and the mysteries of which it treats. The fit- 
fulness of a mourner's mood will hardly be held as a 
sufficient excuse to justify or to reconcile such in- 
compatible incoherences of meditation and profession. 
To say that these effusions of natural sorrow make no 
pretence, and would be worthy of contempt if they 
pretended, to solve or satisfy men's doubts — and 
then to renew the appearance of an incessant or even 
a fitful endeavour after some such satisfaction or 
solution — is surely so incongruous as to sound al- 
most insincere. But the possession of a book so 
wholly noble and so profoundly beautiful in itself is 
more precious than the most coherent essay towards 
the solution of any less insoluble problem." 

The American critics have been less strenuous. 
Mr. Stedman in his Victorian Poets does not hesitate 
to find in Tennyson's poem qualities in which Mil- 
ton's and Shelley's marvellous dirges are wanting. 
'' It is the great threnody of our language by virtue 
of unique conception and power," he says ; '' Lycidas 
with its primrose beauty and varied lofty flights is 
but the extension of a theme set by Moschus and 
Bion. Shelley in Adonais despite his spiritual ec- 
stasy and splendour of lament followed the same 
masters, — yes, and took his landscape and imagery 
from distant climes ; Swinburne's dirge for Baudelaire 
is a wonder of melody ; nor do we forget the Thyrsis 
of Arnold, and other modern ventures in a direction 
where the sweet and absolute solemnity of the Saxon 
tongue is most apparent. Still as an original and 



40 irenns^on^ 

intellectual production In Memoriam is beyond them 
all, and a more important though possibly no more 
enduring creation of rhythmic art." This, certainly, 
is going very far in generosity of appreciation, and 
Dr. Van Dyke goes farther still in a different direction, 
finding in the sorrowful beauty of the liquid music 
the ever-desired testimony to immortality. "The 
heart of man which can win such victory out of its 
darkest defeat," he writes, "and reap such harvest 
from the furrows of the grave, is neither sprung from 
dust nor destined to return to it. A poem like In 
Memoriam more than all flowers of the returning 
spring, more than all shining wings that flutter 
above the ruins of the chrysalis, more than all sculp- 
tured tombs and monuments of the beloved dead, is 
the living evidence and intimation of an endless life." 
Thus the pendulum of criticism has swung on the 
subject of In Memoriam, and we are much too near 
to it and to Tennyson to attempt to find the precise 
resting point of truth ; but when the favourite com- 
plaint of its adversaries is made — that it is shallow in 
feeling because it ripples so musically, we may re- 
mind ourselves that it is not the type of man's deep- 
est suffering. Tennyson when Hallam died was only 
twenty-four years old, and although the two were 
united by ties of intellectual sympathy and ardent 
love, they had known one another but four years, 
and there had been but little time to build up that 
close and massive structure of accumulated associa- 
tions the tearing down of which marks for so many 



'"in fIDemorlam/' 41 

the passing of joy. It was not the kind of grief 
^hich strikes into silence. There was remaining the 
insistent impulse of youth to act, to show reverence, 
to lay the sacrifice of words upon an altar. The 
result was a tender poem which should hardly be 
criticised because it does not lift the mind out of its 
own familiar atmosphere. 

in biographical interest In Memoriam is singularly 
rich. Tennyson fixed by instinct upon the definite, 
the visible, to give his poem solidity. In the midst 
of perplexing obstructions he never forgot his narra- 
tive, the story of his friendship and of his bereave- 
ment. With the exception of the single passage in 
which the shepherd recalls hours spent together 
''upon the self-same hill," Milton's ''Lycidas" might 
be a wail from the genius of a pine forest, so unexpres- 
sive is it of man's natural fondness for recalling scenes 
and incidents. In Memoriam, on the contrary, tells 
us how individual hours were spent, and the aspect 
of the immediate surroundings. We thus get beau- 
tiful pictures of our own world if not the wild, un- 
earthly music of a different sphere. 

We see Cambridge as it was, and as it long will be : 

** I past beside the reverend walls 

In which of old I wore the gown ; 
I roved at random thro* the town, 
And saw the tumult of the halls ; 

And heard once more in college fanes 
The storm their high-built organs make, 
And thunder-music, rolling, shake 

The prophets blazon'd on the panes ; 



42 ^ennueom 

And caught once more the distant shout, 
The measured pulse of racing oars 
Among the willows ; paced the shores 

And many a bridge and all about 

The same grey flats again, and felt 
The same, but not the same ; and last 
Up that long walk of limes I past 

To see the rooms in which he dwelt." 

These rooms are on the west side of the new 
court, with the quadrangle on one side, and on the 
other looking out upon the 'Mong walk of limes," 
the chief beauty of Cambridge. The trees are begin- 
ning to show signs of decay, and Professor Church 
says that ''in another sixty years, if the ground has 
not been meanwhile laid out in allotments, the 
avenue will have given place to the successor which 
has been prudently provided, but which will hardly 
equal it in beauty." 

We see also the dark house in the *'long, un- 
lovely street," where Hallam lived in London, and 
had his little jest about being found ''always at sixes 
and sevens." (The house was 67 Wimpole Street.) 
We see the old yew that grasps at the stones in 
Clevedon churchyard, and we have final glimpses of 
the landscape in the neighbourhood of Somersby. 
The bells that Tennyson brought into his poems 
whenever he could, are characteristic of Lincolnshire 
and have been since Drayton wrote of its "bells and 
bagpipes." Tennyson refers to them in the twenty- 
eighth canto with his usual precision of detail : 



*'1ln fIDemodam/' 43 

** The time draws near the birth of Christ : 
The moon is hid ; the night is still ; 
The Christmas bells from hill to hill 
Answer each other in the mist. 

Four voices of four hamlets round, 

From far and near, on mead and moor, 
Swell out and fail as if a door 

Were shut between me and the sound." 

And from the same lines we learn another character- 
istic of the county, the nearness to each other of its 
villages, and the old custom of beginning to ring the 
bells a month or six weeks before Christmas. We 
catch curious glimpses also of the holidays spent at 
Somersby and their idyllic occupations, when Emily 
Tennyson brought her harp into the garden and 
''flung a ballad to the brightening moon," or when 
in the woods or by the sea they had their '' picnics," 
ever the joy of youth, with 

''The wine flask lying couch'd in moss, 
Or cool'd within the glooming wave." 

We get delicious suggestions of sounds 

** to rout the brood of cares, 

The sweep of scythe in morning dew, 

The gust that round the garden flew, 

And tumbled half the mellowing pears ! " 

And we feel more, perhaps, than from any other 
poem that Tennyson is the poet of the English home ; 
as Burns of the Scotchman's cottage. 

We feel from it, also, that he is the poet of re- 
ligious sentiment as it exists in the general English 
mind. 



44 ^enn?eon- 

Concerning Tennyson's religion a vast amount has 
been written ; he has been proven and disproven gnos- 
tic and agnostic, theist and atheist and Christian ; and 
the chief burden of his religious message rests upon In 
Memoriam. It is not in the least necessary to go over 
the ground again, as the first stanza of the introduction 
to the poem, written in 1 849, contains enough ' ' creed " 
to satisfy the anxious : 

*' Strong Son of God, immortal Love, • 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face. 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace, 
Believing where we cannot prove." 

For the rest, Tennyson is absolutely lucid in his ex- 
pression of religious feeling ; and appeals to those who 
make it their intention to believe against all difficul- 
ties. He does not propose to doubters the relief of 
action, and therefore he would hardly bring comfort to 
those in whom the deep forces of instinctive skepti- 
cism play ; for such, Browning has written : 

'* What I aspired to be, 
And was not, comforts me ; 
A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale." 

Nor would Tennyson in the attitude of philosopher 
delight the truly philosophic soul which finds it 
possible to contemplate the life already lived as its 
own sufficient reward ; which asks with Matthew 
Arnold : 

*' Is it so small a thing 
To have enjoyed the sun, 
To have lived light in the spring, 



f( 



lln flDemoriam, 



45 



To have loved, to have thought, to have done, 

To have advanced true friends, and beat down baffling foes ? " 

The message of In Memoriam, of ''Vastness," of 
''The Ancient Sage," of '' Akbar's Dream," and of all 
the other many poems into which Tennyson's religion 
enters, is a message of reverence for the consecrated 
traditions of Christianity, and of faith unlimited by 
those or by any other traditions. 




CHAPTER IV. 
MATURITY. 

THE ten years' space after Hallam's death was 
for Tennyson an important period. Until 
1837 he dwelt at Somersby, where every ob- 
ject had its associations, but the doors had closed 
upon his actual youth. He made occasional trips to 
London that were dependent apparently on the state 
of his purse, and he saw there his friends, but in the 
main he was content to shun delights and live labori- 
ous days, if we may form any conclusion from the 
list of his studies. He had a study for every day in 
the week, and he added a language for the after- 
noons of five days. It was characteristic of him 
that on Sundays he studied theology. He was 
preparing the mind from which In Memoriam was 
to spring, enriching it with such ideas and know- 
ledge of words as should, he thought, give force and 
colour and grace to his poetry. Science interested 
him in its testimony to the order and symmetry of 
the universe ; metaphysics interested him as throw- 
ing light upon the intricate workings of the human 

mind ; the beauty of nature, the significance of 

46 



solemn skies and 'Meaves that redden to their fall," 
contributed to the reverence with which he regarded 
the Giver of life and death. In the poem that was 
slowly forming in his mind he grouped knowledge 
and faith, fact and sentiment, with a curious harmon- 
ising of contradictory elements. His method has 
been condemned for its eclecticism by those who find 
their greatest satisfaction in a certain classic severity 
of diction not readily departing from the old vocabu- 
lary. Mr. Pater, on the other hand, wrote in his 
essay on ''Style" : 

''English, for a quarter of a century past, has 
been assimilating the phraseology of pictorial art ; 
for half a century, the phraseology of the great Ger- 
man metaphysical movement of eighty years ago ; 
in part, also, the language of mystical theology : and 
none but pedants will regret a great consequent in- 
crease of its resources. For many years to come its 
enterprise may well lie in the naturalisation of the 
vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of 
a sensitive scholarship — a liberal naturalisation of the 
ideas of science too, for, after all, the chief stimulus 
of good style is to possess a full, rich, complex mat- 
ter to grapple with." 

Tennyson did precisely this, bending his nine- 
teenth-century intellect to the task of naturalising 
and also of spiritualising scientific and metaphysical 
ideas and their phraseology, in a most unprecedented 
fashion. This adaptation of his art to his age con- 
stituted, perhaps, his chief claim to originality. His 



48 ^enn?6on» 

mind was not like Browning's, a quarry of native 
marble ; it was rather a mint, receiving and giving 
current value to the ore of a thousand mines. He 
anticipated, in his dreams and visions, subjects that 
were presently to be chief interests with the public, 
with much of the instinct that serves the true jour- 
nalist who makes an art of his profession. He kept 
writing and destroying, forming and reforming his 
style, pursuing his ideal in silence, until he felt him- 
self ready to face his earlier critics with the old ma- 
terial improved, and new poems superior to those 
they had found wanting. There was no tendency in 
him to faint and fail under adverse criticism as poor 
Keats was supposed to have done. He chose the 
honourable defence of increased striving toward un- 
assailable performance. This was the sort of artistic 
control that FitzGerald admired. He wrote to Donne 
in the autumn of 1833 : 

'' Tennyson has been in town for some time. He 
has been making fresh poems which are finer, they 
say, than any he has done. But I believe he is 
chiefly meditating on the purging and subliming of 
what he has already done ; and repents that he has 
published at all yet. It is fine to see how in each 
succeeding poem the smaller ornaments and fancies 
drop away and leave the grand ideas simple."^ 

The field of poetry was at this time occupied by 
Wordsworth alone, of the greater poets. Coleridge 
had departed, Browning was not yet fairly recog- 

» FitzGerald's Letters. 



fDiaturit?. 49 

nised, Byron was dead and his exaggerated influence 
was waning fast, Shelley and Keats were dead, and 
the spirit of their poetry was passing into the poems 
of their successors. With such voices upon the air, 
Tennyson did well faithfully to develop his genius 
before again submitting it to the judgment of the 
public. He could not, however, escape the beguile- 
ments of Annuals. His poem of " St. Agnes " went 
into the Keepsake of 1837 by the persuasion of Lady 
Emmeline Stuart Wortley, and it sounds as though 
he had written it especially for the lady. Monckton 
Milnes found it there, ''looking funny between Lord 
Londonderry and Lord W. Lennox," and promptly 
besought him to contribute to another Annual which 
a Marquis was getting up for charitable purposes. 
Tennyson mirthfully declined, declaring Annuals to 
be '' vapid books," and assuring Milnes that he had 
only written for Lady Wortley because he had heard 
she was beautiful, adding : 

'' But whether the Marquis be beautiful or not, I 
don't much mind ; if he be, let him give God thanks 
and make no boast. To write for people with pre- 
fixes to their names is to milk he-goats — there is 
neither honour nor profit." 

Milnes had a gusty temper, and this energetic 
playfulness so roused him that Tennyson, in the in- 
terests of peace and good-fellowship, was obliged to 
yield the point. He wrote another letter of charming 
forbearance, rallying Milnes on his irritability, and in- 
quiring : ''What has so jaundiced your good-na- 



50 Zi;enn?6on» 

tured eyes as to make them mistake harmless banter 
for insolent irony ? , . , Had I spoken the same 
things to you laughingly in my chair, and with my 
own emphasis, you would have seen what they 
really meant ; but coming to read them, peradven- 
ture, in a fit of indigestion, or with a slight matu- 
tinal headache after your Apostolic symposium, you 
subject them to such misinterpretation as, if I had 
not sworn to be true friend to you till my latest 
death-ruckle, would have gone far to make me in- 
dignant.'" The poem sent was the one beginning, 

'* O that 't were possible, 
After long grief and pain, 
To find the arms of my true love 
'Round me once again." 

This was the germ of Maud, conceived, like so 
many of Tennyson's poems, years before its ripen- 
ing. Mr. Swinburne calls the poignant verses "a 
gentler echo to the Duchess of Malfi's exceeding bit- 
ter cry, 

* O that it were possible we might 
But hold some two days' conference with the dead ! 
From them I should learn something, I am sure, 
I never shall learn here,' " 

and finds in them a supreme example of the '' heav- 
enly beauty " in the higher early notes of Tennyson's 
then '* girlish muse," declaring, '' He never has writ- 
ten anything of more potent perfection, of more 
haunting and overpowering charm." 

^ Wemyss Raid's Life of Lord Houghton. 



flDaturit?* 51 

In 1837, Tennyson's studies and meditations were 
broken in upon by cares of a domestic nature. The 
family were obliged at last to leave Somersby, and 
seek another home. Frederick Tennyson, the won- 
derful old man who has recently died, far along in 
his ninety-first year, was then a young devotee of 
music. He was living at Corfu, where his cousin, 
George d'Eyncourt, was secretary to the High Com- 
missioner, and there are picturesque stories of his 
sitting in the midst of his forty fiddlers in a large hall 
designed by Michael Angelo. He was clearly out 
of the question as a guide, philosopher, and friend in 
the humble affair of moving. The other one of the 
two brothers older than Alfred had become a clergy- 
man, and had been appointed to the curacy of 
Tealby. In 1836, he had married Louisa Sell wood, 
a younger sister of Emily Sellwood who, fourteen 
years later, was to become the wife of Alfred Tenny- 
son. Emily was bridesmaid to her sister, and, if we 
may trust the internal evidence of Tennyson's sonnet 
to ''The Bridesmaid," it was upon this occasion that 
he fell in love with her, and thought : 

"O happy bridesmaid, make a happy bride ! " 

The elder brothers being thus removed from the 
circle, Tennyson was obliged to take up the respon- 
sibilities of house-hunting, and his practical sense 
and readiness in the business give a nice touch to his 
character as a brother and son. He took thought 
even for the kitchen utensils, and his healthy human 



52 zrenn?6on. 

energy in such unpoetic occupation lends perceptibly 
to the large impression oi absolute sincerity that is 
given by the total of his records. Unworldliness is 
said to have been a family trait, and indolence ''the 
besetting sin of the race," but upon occasion they 
could work, and work well. One of Miss Mitford's 
''sweet young friends " brings her a gleeful story of 
making Alfred dig up the whole garden at her father's 
country-living near Sevenoaks, "and he did it capi- 
tally." 

The family seem not to have left any very strong 
impression of their characteristics with the country- 
people among whom they had dwelt for so many 
years. 

Mr. Roberts relates an interview with the old 
parish clerk at Bag Enderby in which he asked him 
if he could remember anything about Tennyson.^ 

" 'Tennyson? 'said he. ' D'ya mean the owd doc- 
tor ? ' Said I, ' Not the doctor particularly, but any 
of the Tennyson family ? ' He replied, ' Tha doctor 
was a fine owd gentleman. I remember on 'im dy- 
ing. It 's a strange long time agoa, an' he 's in a fine 
big tomb agean the church.' 1 asked, ' Do you re- 
member any of the family — any of the sons — Charles 
or Alfred ? ' He began to think, stared vacantly, 
and, as the past dimly rose before him, slowly said, 
' Ye-e-s, 1 do remember Master Alfred, sewerly ; he 
was alus walkin' about the lanes and closins wi' a 
book in 'is 'and ; but when he grew up he wornt at 

* Nicoll and Wise's Literary Anecdotes, 



'oame much ; assiver he went up to Lunnun or some 
big place, and when he yeust ta cum 'oame fur a bit 
one o' the sarvants teld me he yeust ta goa upstairs 
in a top room, an' 'ing a mat ower 'is doar. I doant 
kna' what fur, but they sed he did n't want ta 'ear 
noa noise.'" Mr. Roberts tried many of the vil- 
lagers, but could not find that they remembered 
much beyond Dr. Tennyson's fine stature and ''big 
beard," and Alfred's habit of always '' dawdlin' about 
wi' a book." An old housekeeper gave him, how- 
ever, a vivid description of the '' owd doctor glower- 
ing" in his study, the walls of which were covered 
'' wi' 'eathen gods and goddesses wi'out cloas," and 
of his habit of lying in bed until late in the afternoon. 

After leaving Somersby, the family moved first to 
High Beach, in Epping Forest, where there were *' no 
sounds of nature and no society," Tennyson com- 
plained ; ''equally, a want of birds and men." In 
1840, they went to Tunbridge Wells, and the next 
year to Boxley, near Maidstone. These changes 
brought Tennyson nearer to London and to his 
friends, who were, most of them, servants of litera- 
ture. A gentle trait of character shines in his un- 
readiness to leave home at night when his mother 
was suffering from nervousness — only one of many 
indications of his loyalty to her upon whose "sweet 
lips" perpetually did reign "the summer calm of 
golden charity." 

The Cock Tavern, where Tennyson was in the 
habit of dining when in town, is depicted in "Will 



54 ^enn?6on* 

Waterproofs Lyrical Monologue " ; it is there that he 
pledges the Muse in a pint of port, and in fancy sees 
himself grow 

** in worth, and wit, and sense, 



Imboding critic-pen 
Or that eternal want of pence. 

Which vexes public men, 
Who hold their hands to all, and cry 

For that which all deny them — 
Who sweep the crossings, wet or dry. 

And all the world go by them." 

Spedding, dining with him at The Cock, sends their 
bill-of-fare to Milnes. ''We had two chops," he 
writes, ''one pickle, two cheeses, one pint of stout, 
one pint of port, and three cigars." The port could 
be of any grade for Tennyson, so long as it was 
"sweet, and black, and strong," although "Will 
Waterproof" demands a special kind : 

" not such as that 



You set before chance-comers. 
But such whose father-grape grew fat 
On Lusitanian summers." 

Concerning this ancient tavern Mr. Arthur Waugh 
writes : 

"The old 'Cock' is swept away now, with a 
bank on its site ; and the enthusiast who is anxious 
to get a notion of its appearance must content him- 
self with the pictures of its staircase and dining-room, 
which hang in a room in a new tavern under the old 
name, opposite the Fleet Street end of Chancery Lane. 
The 'old grill-room,' as it is called, is refitted with 



flDaturlt^. 55 

the boxes ' larded with the steam of thirty thousand 
dinners,' with their brass rods and rusty curtains. 
The fine old oak fireplace has been moved there bod- 
ily ; the floor is still sanded, and the crockery is of 
the willow pattern. And ever bustling and hustling 
his two boy assistants, Paul, himself a waiter at the 
former house, strives with a genial contempt for con- 
ventionality to keep the old spirit astir in the new 
surroundings. ' Chump-chop — opposight the fire- 
place ! Two kippers in order. Hurry up that rabbit 
for the chair-table, please. Good evening, gentle- 
men, and thank you.' And Paul rattles you out as 
hurriedly as he welcomed you in.'" 

Upon the occasions when Tennyson visited his 
friends in their homes, he clung to the habit of his 
college days, sitting up late and reading his poetry 
aloud in his chanting voice, which has been variously 
described as deep, sonorous, bell-like, organ-like, flex- 
ible, monotonous, musical, indistinct, and metallic. 
Blakesly did not wonder that he complained of nerv- 
ousness. " How should he do otherwise, seeing that 
he smokes the strongest and most stinking tobacco out 
of a small blackened clay pipe on an average nine hours 
every day ? " The aroma of tobacco hangs about all 
the early years, and is hardly less perceptible in the 
later accounts of the poet, who probably thought with 
his friend Carlyle that ' ' sedative, gently soothing, gen- 
tly clarifying tobacco smoke, with the obligation to 
a minimum of speech," gives human intellect and in- 

* Waugh's Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 



56 Zi;cnn?0on* 

sight their best chance. In the spring of 1835, we 
find Tennyson and FitzGerald with the Speddings 
in the Lake country. Spedding's father, a practical 
old man with the shrewder temper of the earlier 
generation, grumbled amusingly at the amount of 
time given up to poetry during the visit. FitzGer- 
ald pacified the elders with checkers while smoke 
and poetry were going on upstairs, and old Mr. Sped- 
ding would inquire sarcastically: ''Well, Mr. Fitz- 
Gerald, and what is it ? Mr. Tennyson reads and Jim 
criticises ? Is that it ? " And that was it. But the 
enthusiasm had good stuff to feed upon. Tennyson's 
friends took him seriously because they understood 
him, not because they were foolish hero-worship- 
pers. At that time FitzGerald himself, who was 
later to be the most dissatisfied of critics, found every 
promise in the young, noble poetry of his companion: 
''When he has felt life," was his confident comment, 
*'you will see him acquire all that at present you 
miss : he will not die fruitless of instruction as he is." 
In 1842, Moxon, of Dover Street, got out two vol- 
umes of Poems by Alfred Tennyson, containing the 
cream of the earlier volumes, and much new mate- 
rial that showed steady and consistent progress to- 
ward an exigent ideal. The tremulous boyish tone 
had changed to one much graver and more certain. 
The toys of fancy were for the most part laid aside ; 
in their place were inquiry and reflection, a reaching 
out toward life, and a realisation of the ultimate mys- 
tery. The poem "Ulysses" is, perhaps, the most 




James Spedding. 

By G. F. Watts, R. A. 



f»aturit?* 57 

profoundly intelligent poem to be found in the now 
con.plete works, and ''The Gardener's Daughter" 
and the '' Idyl of Dora " show the influence of Words- 
worth's point of view, if not of his method, and are 
the better for it. The elder poet, always chary of 
his praise and difficult to please, was beginning to 
distinguish the genuine note of Tennyson's verse. 
After seeing him in London he wrote to Professor 
Reed : '* He is decidedly the first of our living poets, 
and I hope will live to give the world still better 
things. You will be pleased to hear that he ex- 
pressed in the strongest terms his gratitude to my 
writings. To this I was far from indifferent, though 
persuaded that he is not much in sympathy with 
what I should myself value in my attempts, viz., the 
spirituality with which 1 have endeavoured to invest 
the material universe, and the moral relations under 
which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary ap- 
pearances." 

Mr. Wace quotes from the life of Thomas Cooper 
an interesting passage showing Wordsworth's atti- 
tude towards his subsequent successor. The con- 
versation recorded took place in 1846: ''Cooper 
asked Wordsworth's opinion of the poetry of the 
day. ' There is little that can be called high poetry,' 
he said ; ' Mr. Tennyson affords the richest promise. 
He will do great things yet, and ought to have done 
greater things by this time.' ' His sense of music' 
observed Cooper, ' seems more perfect than that of 
any of the new race of poets.' ' Yes,' he replied ; 



s8 ^enn?6on. 

' the perception of harmony lies in the very essence of 
the poet's nature, and Mr. Tennyson gives magni- 
ficent proofs that he is endowed with it.' Cooper 
instanced Tennyson's rich association of musical 
words as proofs of his possessing as fine a sense of 
music in syllables as Keats and even Milton, and the 
patriarchal poet, with an approving smile, assented."^ 

A year or two before Carlyle had written to Em- 
erson : "Singing, in our curt English speech, con- 
trived expressly and almost exclusively for ' despatch 
of business,' is terribly difficult. Alfred Tennyson, 
alone of our time, has proved it to be possible in some 
measure." 

The demonstrative Carlyle, flinging his challenges 
right and left, delighting in brave words and rough 
virtues and angry remonstrance, also delighted in 
Tennyson both as man and poet. He sketched him 
in words so vividly that we should have to go far 
afield to get a better picture of him as he was in the 
bloom of his manhood. In 1844 he wrote : " Moxon 
informs me that Tennyson is now in Town and means 
to come and see me. Of this result 1 shall be very 
glad. Alfred is one of the few British or foreign 
figures (a not increasing number, 1 think) who are 
and remain beautiful to me, a true human soul or 
some authentic approximation thereto, to whom 
your own soul can say ' Brother ! ' — However, 1 
doubt he will not come ; he often skips me in these 
brief visits to Town ; skips everybody, indeed, being 

^ Wace's Alfred Tennyson. 



fIDaturiti?* 59 

a man solitary and sad, as certain men are, dwell- 
ing in an element of gloom, carrying a bit of Chaos 
about him, in short, which he is manufacturing 
into Cosmos." 

And again : 

*' Alfred is the son of a Lincolnshire Gentleman 
Farmer. I think, indeed, you see in his verses that 
he is native of ' moated granges ' and green fat pas- 
tures, not of mountains and their torrents and storms. 
He had his breeding at Cambridge as if for the Law 
or Church ; being master of a small annuity on his 
Father's decease, he preferred clubbing with his 
Mother and some Sisters, to live unpromoted and 
write Poems. In this way he lives still, now here, 
now there, the family always within reach of London, 
never in it ; he himself making rare and brief visits, 
lodging in some old Comrade's rooms. 1 think he 
must be under forty, and not much under it. One 
of the finest-looking men in the world. A great 
shock of rough, dusty-dark hair ; bright-laughing 
hazel eyes, massive aquiline face, most massive yet 
most delicate ; of sallow-brown complexion, almost 
Indian-looking. Clothes cynically loose, free and 
easy ; — smokes infinite tobacco. His voice is musical 
metallic,— fit for loud laughter and piercing wail ; and 
all that may lie between ; speech and speculation 
Tree and plenteous. I do not meet in these late 
decades, such company over a pipe. We shall 
see what he will grow to. He is often unwell, very 
chaotic — his way is through Chaos and the Bottom- 



6o ^enn?0on. 

less and Pathless ; not handy for making out many 
miles upon." 

To a mind less dramatic than Carlyle's, Tenny- 
son's '' Chaos " was of the surface rather than of the 
depths. His spirit moved with orderly development. 
His new poems showed his various inclinations to- 
ward nature and romance, toward themes of the past, 
and visions of the future. He was interested rather 
than passionate, little of a partisan, and occupied with 
ultimate beauty and good more than with immediate 
revenges or reforms. In spite of grave spiritual ques- 
tionings, there was no tumult of inquiry into the 
buried life such as might be found in Paracelsus, pub- 
lished in the same decade. Nor was there any vio- 
lence of political passion, such as Wordsworth and 
Coleridge and Shelley had felt. The deep and quiet 
philosophy of the Laureate-to-be was expressed by 
'' Will Waterproof" when he soliloquised : 

** Ah yet, tho' all the world forsake, 

Tho' fortune clip my wings, 
I will not cramp my heart, nor take 

Half-views of men and things. 
Let Whig and Tory stir their blood ; 

There must be stormy weather ; 
But for some true result of good 

All parties work together." 

The riots in England, the Chartist and Socialist 
agitations, were painful to him but did not excite 
him beyond reason. His attitude toward social 
questions is examined at some length by Stopford 



fIDaturU?* 6i 

Brooke, who manifestly disapproves the calm and 
reverential temperament : 

'' One would have thought that a poet," he says, 
*' touched by the reality of misery and its exceeding 
bitter cry, would have held the balance equally poised 
at least, and not yielded too far to the reaction ; that 
he would have had indignation at the state of society, 
and been inwardly urged to give, in the manner of 
a prophet, some prediction of a hope near at hand 
for the woes and weakness of the oppressed. But 
though there are many passages where Tennyson 
does try to hold an equal balance, and to excuse or 
even to advocate the impassioned rising of the op- 
pressed in speech or act against their fate, these pas- 
sages are short, are tentative ; he is, as it were, 
forced into them ; and the main line he takes is the 
line of careful protection of the old against the onset 
of the new, of steady but very prudent advance 
through obedience to existing law, of protest against 
that which he calls 'raw haste,' of discouraging of 
indignant speech and act on the part of the people, 
of distrust, even of contempt for what seemed to him 
the mob and for their ' lawless din ' ; and in conse- 
quence of all this, he puts off the regeneration of 
society to a period so far away that it may be counted 
by thousands and thousands of years. It is with al- 
most a scientific analysis of the whole question of 
the future society, and with arguments drawn from 
geology (as if humanity were in close analogy to 
Nature), that he predicts the enormous time in which 



62 li;enn?0on* 

the betterment or the perfection of society will be 
wrought. He had really little or no faith in man as 
man, but he had faith in man as conducted, in rea- 
sonable obedience, to the final restitution by an 
entity which he called law, and which was in reality 
his own conception of the Constitution of England 
built up into power, not by the people, but by a few 
great men and by the bulk of the educated and 
landed classes, who alone were fit to direct the blind 
forces of the people.'" 

This position was not, perhaps, adapted to the 
poetic pose, but Tennyson, so far as he maintained it 
in his poetry, invested it with much dignity and 
charm ; and he did not hesitate to relinquish it where 
the question seemed to him one of liberty for those 
qualified to use it intelligently. Dr. Van Dyke has 
compared his patriotism to Milton's, finding both poets 
*' Englishmen to the heart's core. They do not say, 
* My Country, right or wrong ! ' They protest in 
noble scorn against all kinds of tyrannies and hy- 
pocrisies. They are not bound in conscienceless 
servility to any mere political party. They are the 
partisans of England, and England to them means 
freedom, justice, righteousness, Christianity." He 
points out Tennyson's sympathy with the American 
spirit, quoting from the poem called " England and 
America in 1782 " : 

" What wonder, if in noble heat 

Those men thine arms withstood, 

* Stopford Brooke's Tennyson : His Art and Relation to Modern Life. 



flDaturit?. 63 

Retaught the lesson thou hadst taught, 
And in thy spirit with thee fought — 
Who sprang from English blood ! 

Whatever harmonies of law 

The growing world assume, 
Thy work is thine — the single note 
From that deep chord which Hampden smote 

Will vibrate to the doom." 

And he adds : '' Here is the Miltonic spirit of pa- 
triotism, not now disturbed and roughened by the 
harshness of opposition, the bitterness of disappoint- 
ment, the sadness of despair, but rounded in the 
calm fulness of triumph." ' 

To a plain mind acquiescing in the impossibility 
of ever getting at the precise truth of anything, 
Tennyson's point of view is refreshing. It is high 
and it has a wide scope. There is no valid reason for 
rejecting it as unpoetic. A belief founded in strong 
national common-sense, scornful alike of causeless 
rebellion and of tyranny, calm with the placidity of 
the long view, may be quite as artistic a choice, com- 
pared to the storm and stress of a more zealous 
creed, as the choice of a painter who goes for his 
subject to flat marshes and wide horizons, preferring 
them to mountain peaks and waterfalls. Words- 
worth, who had had his hour of sympathising with 
the '' red fool fury of the Seine," or at least with the 
emotions that led up to it, could none the less appre- 
ciate the poem beginning, 

' Van Dyke's The Poetry of Tennyson. 



64 ^enn?0on- 

** Love thou thy land with love far brought 
From out the storied past," 

and feel the '' solidity and nobility " of the thought, 
and the " stateliness of the diction." 

As Tennyson's mind gradually filled with the 
affairs of humanity, his power of depicting nature did 
not diminish. His 1842 work is rich with lovely, 
intimate studies of landscape, and he felt the genius 
of places, of country places at all events, as an Eng- 
lish poet should. But by his own confession he grew 
less inclined to enjoy nature alone. In spite of oc- 
casional craving for the solemn isolation of the sea, 
he grew more and more to consider the world of 
nature as the habitation of man. Stopford Brooke 
finds him chilling in this as in his political and social 
views, and complains that his attitude toward nature 
is that of a scientist with an eye for beauty. ''The 
descriptions," he writes, ''are vivid, accurate, lovely 
on the outside, but cold. They have no voice of love 
or comfort for the heart of man. When 1 say this, I 
apply it only to his descriptions of Nature apart from 
humanity, of Nature by herself. When he mingles up 
human life with Nature, then his descriptions of her 
seem warm. But it is the human sentiment trans- 
ferred to Nature which warms her. By herself in the 
poetry of Tennyson, she remains without any sym- 
pathy of her own for us." Ruskin found the same 
fault. He accused Tennyson of employing "the 
pathetic fallacy," and endowing Nature with his own 
feelings in place of describing her with classical direct- 



flDaturlti?. 65 

ness as Homer would, or giving her a sentiment of 
her own. Scott, he said, would never have altered 
Nature to make her larkspurs listen for his lady's 
foot. He would be much more inclined to say : 
"What am I that 1 should trouble this sincere Nature 
with my thought ? I happen to be feverish and de- 
pressed, and I could see a great many sad and strange 
things in those waves and flowers ; but I have no 
business to see such things."^ 

It happens, however, that most people like their 
nature to reflect the human, and Tennyson's land- 
scapes appeal to the majority of readers by virtue of 
the quality that irritates Ruskin and wearies Stopford 
Brooke. The poet arranges such pleasant scenes, 
and points out such charming, interesting truths that 
one can verify with careful observation, he places 
man in such idyllic surroundings and so artfully brings 
them into harmony with his mood, that it seems dis- 
courteous, almost churlish, not to admire and be 
grateful. Even the caustic Swinburne fell captive 
and ceased to search for the inevitable flaw, when 
he came under the charm of the outward and visible 
world seen through Tennyson's eyes. He recounted 
this yielding in the most genial passage he ever 
accorded the elder poet until he came to sing his 
threnody. 

'' Many years ago," he wrote, '' as I have always 
remembered, on the appearance of the first four Idylls 
of the King, one of the greatest painters now living 

^ Ruskin 's Modern Painters. 



66 ^enn^eoiv 

pointed out to me, with a briet word ot rapturous 
admiration, the wonderful breadth of beauty and the 
perfect force of truth in a single verse of ' Elaine ' : 

'And white sails flying on the yellow sea.' 

I could not but feel conscious at once of its charm and 
of the equally certain fact that 1, though cradled and 
reared beside the sea, had never seen anything like 
that. But on the first bright day I ever spent on the 
eastern coast of England I saw the truth of this touch 
at once, and recognised once more with admiring de- 
light the subtle and sure fidelity of that happy and stu- 
dious hand. There on the dull yellow foamless fioor of 
dense discoloured sea, so thick with clotted sand 
that the water looked massive and solid as the shore, 
the white sails flashed whiter against it and along it 
as they fled : and I knew once more the truth of 
what 1 never had doubted — that the eye and the 
hand of Tennyson may always be trusted, at once 
and alike, to see and to express the truth. "^ 

The fact of the distinction remains, however. 
Tennyson's pictures of nature are usually presented 
as backgrounds to the human figure, and are as per- 
sonal as Shelley's are impersonal. He tried always 
to represent a seeming significance in the aspect of 
field or sky. His landscapes do not ever let one 
alone to dream at will — they impose the dream ; it 
must be a chosen vision, and the poet himself must 
be the one to choose it. It is like the painting of 

^ Swinburne's Miscellanies. 



flDaturitij. 67 

Turner, who transfers his mood to the mountains or 
waves that he paints for you, in contrast with the 
method of Whistler, who merely sets before you the 
prodigious strangeness of the truth and lets you think 
as you like about it. Or, to use a more obvious illus- 
tration, Tennyson's poetry is throughout like a certain 
kind of hospitality where the day is planned for the 
guest— with the utmost care, with the utmost skill, 
but there is no escape. 

It is curious that a poet, in whom the classic spirit, 
if it dwelt at all, underwent some amazing transform- 
ations, should nevertheless have made his best poems 
upon subjects drawn from the far past. Had he let 
the first and great ''Ulysses," the revised ''CEnone," 
and the ''Morte d'Arthur " stand for what he could do 
in the way of reviving an ancient story and fitting it 
to a modern taste, there would probably have been 
very little adverse criticism of his efforts in this direc- 
tion. Gleams of light played for him over the long- 
dead world of myths and epics, and showed him 
beautiful ghosts who warmed to a strange familiar 
life at his touch. The " Morte d'Arthur " was read to 
Landor as early as 1837, and he says of it: ''It is 
more Homeric than any poem of our time, and 
rivals some of the noblest parts of the Odyssea.'' 
He cannot refrain from adding a comparison be- 
tween Tennyson's simplicity and Wordsworth's, 
with a delicious parody of the latter's least en- 
gaging manner. 

Miss Barrett, who was soon to be chided for af- 



68 ^enn?6on» 

fecting Tennyson's style, wrote, upon receiving the 
new volumes from her cousin, John Kenyon : 

'' I ought to be thanking you for your great kind- 
ness about this divine Tennyson. Beautiful ! beau- 
tiful ! After all it is a noble thing to be a poet. But 
notwithstanding the poetry of the novelties, nothing 
appears to me quite equal to 'CEnone,'and perhaps 
a few besides of my ancient favourites. That is not 
said in disparagement of the last, but in admiration 
of the first. There is, in fact, more thought— more 
bare, brave working of the intellect — in the latter po- 
ems, even if we miss something of the high ideality, 
and the music that goes with it, of the older ones. 
Only I am always inclined to believe that philosophic 
thinking, like music, is involved, however occultly, in 
high ideality, of any kind.'" 

In spite of this enthusiasm. Miss Barrett was far 
from conceding every virtue to the "divine Tenny- 
son," and a letter to Mr. Westwood in 1843 is inter- 
esting, not only in its criticism, but in the note of 
loneliness and the preoccupation with moral senti- 
ment. At this time Miss Barrett was lying ''all day 
and day after day " on her sofa, and her windows 
did not even look into the street. The ivy, striking 
its leaves on the pane when the wind blew some- 
what briskly, was all she had to bring the sound of 
forests and groves into her life. The Prince had not 
yet penetrated the Wood. 

"You are probably right in respect to Tennyson," 

' Frederick G. Kenyon's The Letters of Elizabeth 'Barrett Browning. 



flDaturit^ 69 

she wrote, *'for whom, with all my admiration of 
him, I would willingly secure more exaltation and a 
broader clasping of the truth. Still it is not possible 
to have so much beauty without a certain portion of 
truth, the position of the Utilitarians being true in the 
inverse. But I think as 1 did of ' uses ' and ' respon- 
sibilities,' and do hold that the poet is a preacher and 
must look to his doctrine. 

'' Perhaps Mr. Tennyson will grow more solemn, 
like the sun, as his day goes on. In the meantime 
we have the noble 'Two Voices,' and, among other 
grand intimations of a touching power, certain stan- 
zas to J. K. (I think the initials are) ^ on the death of 
his brother, which very deeply affected me. 

'' Take away the last stanzas, which should be ap- 
plied more definitely to the body or cut away alto- 
gether as a lie against eternal verity, and the poem 
stands as one of the finest of monodies. The nature 
of human grief never, surely, was more tenderly inti- 
mated or touched — it brought tears to my eyes. Do 
read it. He is not a Christian poet, up to this time, 
but let us listen and hear his next songs. He is one 
of God's singers whether he knows it or does not 
know it." 

The same year she was trying to formulate her 
opinion of the ''rising" poet for publication in Mr. 
Home's curious and daring book called The New 
Spirit of the Age, a collection of criticisms upon con- 
temporaries, including a paper on Tennyson. Miss 

» The lines ''To J. S." 



70 ZTennijaom 

Barrett's name does not appear ; but her contribu- 
tions to the article are separated from it, and pub- 
lished in Nicoll and Wise's Literary Anecdotes. She 
begins prophetically, in her expansive way : 

''The name of Alfred Tennyson is pressing 
slowly, calmly, but surely,— with certain recognition 
but no loud shouts of greeting, — from the lips of the 
discerners of poets, of whom there remain a few even 
in the cast-iron ages, along the lips of the less in- 
formed public ' to its own place ' in the starry house 
of names. That it is the name of a true poet, the 
drowsy public exerts itself to acknowledge ; testify- 
ing with a heavy lifting of the eyelid to its conscious- 
ness of a new light in one of the nearer sconces. 
This poet's public is certainly awake to him, — al- 
though you would not think so." 

There could hardly be a worse example of the 
parenthetical style ; but the thought was sound 
enough. The public was awake, not only in England 
but in America. 

Lowell greeted his contemporary with the decisive 
declaration that it might be centuries before another 
such thinker and speaker as Tennyson appeared. 
Edgar Allan Poe, who had a natural sympathy with 
lyric metres, was inclined to rank him "the greatest 
of poets," and wrote : ''By the enjoyment or non- 
enjoyment of the ' Morte d'Arthur' or 'CEnone' I 
would test anyone's ideal sense." He felt, how- 
ever, the same deficiency in rhythm that Coleridge 
had found at the very first: "Tennyson's shorter 



flDaturltij* 71 

pieces abound in minute rhythmical lapses sufficient 
to assure me that, in common with all poets living or 
dead, he has neglected to make precise investigation 
of the principles of metre. But, on the other hand, so 
perfect is his rhythmical instinct in general that he 
seems to see with his ear." 

In 1842, Charles Sumner wrote to Milnes : '' T.'s 
poems have been reprinted in Boston, and the re- 
print is a precise copy of the English edition in size, 
type, and paper, so that it is difficult to distinguish 
the two editions. It is reprinted for the benefit of 
the author, to whom the publisher hopes to remit 
some honorarium. Emerson and his followers are 
ardent admirers of Tennyson, and it is their enthusi- 
astic, unhesitating praise that induced a bookseller to 
undertake the reprint. There are some things in the 
2nd volume which I admire very much. ' Locksley 
Hall ' has some significant verses and others hardly 
intelligible. ' Godiva ' is unequalled as a narrative in 
verse, and the little stories of ' Lady Clare ' and the 
* Lord of Burleigh ' are told in beautiful measure. I am 
struck with the melody of his verse, its silver ring, 
and its high poetic fancy ; but does it not want 
elevated thought and manliness ? Yet in its way 
what can be more exquisite than CEnone making 
Mount Ida echo with her complaints? Was her 
story ever told in a sweeter strain in any language ? 
I understand that Emerson is afraid that Tennyson 
since he published his first volume has become ' a 
fine gentleman,' by which I suppose he means that 



72 Zi;enn?6on» 

his free thought and voluntary numbers will be con- 
strained by the conventions of the world." 

Thomas Aird, the Scotch poet, gave a judgment 
of mingled praise and blame : 'M have been saunter- 
ing for some time, reading Alfred Tennyson's poems 
and other light matters. Alfred's brother lent me his 
poems. Beautiful they are certainly, strong and 
manly often, but oftener capricious, silly, and affected. 
' Godiva ' was a difficult affair, certainly, yet treated 
with what perfect grace and beauty ! " 

In the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, James Sped- 
ding and John Sterling had appreciative and discrim- 
inating reviews. Sterling naturally took a different 
tone from that which Lockhart had used with refer- 
ence to the earlier volume. ''The blank-verse 
poems," he wrote, '' have a quiet completeness and 
depth, a sweetness arising from the happy balance 
of thought, feeling, and expression, that ranks them 
among the richest of our recent literature." He adds, 
however, a keen criticism of Tennyson's notable fail- 
ing : ''His feelings are always strictly watched by 
his meditative conscience, too strictly not for wisdom 
but for rapture. The poetry would have streamed 
out in a freer gush and flushed the heart with ampler 
joy had the moral been less obtruded as its constant 
aim." 

Thus, on the eve of Wordsworth's appointment to 
the Laureateship, while Browning was having Bells 
and Pomegranates printed as pamphlets with cheap 
type, to be sold at sixpence, and Landor was playing 



■^ 




Robert Browning. 

From life. 



flDaturit?» 



73 



with the little dog ''Pomero" among his daphnes 
and hyacinths, and writing poems for Lady Bless- 
ington, Tennyson stepped into his permanent place 
among the greater British poets. 




CHAPTER V. 
^^THE PRINCESS," AND PARALLEL PASSAGES. 

AFTER the publication of the 1842 volumes, 
Tennyson was much in London among the 
literary men of the time. Carlyle, Words- 
worth, Thackeray, the aged Rogers, Dickens, Leigh 
Hunt, Aubrey de Vere, — these are names taken at 
random from the lists of his acquaintances, and in 
such company he must have found sufficient enjoy- 
ment. Emerson, visiting London in that fifth dec- 
ade, found English society very rich, though, to his 
oxygenated mind, not entirely satisfying. 

''There is nowhere so much wealth of talent and 
character and social accomplishment," he writes to a 
friend; '' every star outshone by one more dazzling, 
and you cannot move without coming into the light 
and fame of new ones. I have seen, I suppose, some 
good specimens, chiefly of the literary fashionable, 
and not of the fashionable, sort. . . . They have 
all carried the art of agreeable sensations to a wonder- 
ful pitch ; they know everything, have everything ; 
they are rich, plain, polite, proud, and admirable. 
But, though good for them, it ends in the using. I 

74 



'*Zhc pvinccBB,** ant) parallel paaeagee. 75 

shall or should soon have enough of this play for my 
occasion."^ 

During this visit, Emerson met Tennyson at the 
house of Coventry Patmore. One can imagine the in- 
spired rustic face to face with the writer of " Godiva " 
and ''The Lady of Shalott " ; and the description he 
gives of the meeting is very suggestive. " I was 
contented with him at once, " he writes in his journal ; 
''he is tall and scholastic-looking, no dandy, but a 
great deal of plain strength about him, and though 
cultivated, quite unaffected. Qiiiet sluggish sense 
and thought ; refined as all English are, and good- 
humoured. There is in him an air of general superior- 
ity that is very satisfactory. He lives with his college 
set, . . . and has the air of one who is ac- 
customed to be petted and indulged by those he 
lives with. Take away Hawthorne's bashfulness 
and let him talk easily and fast and you would have 
a pretty good Tennyson. 1 told him that his friends 
and 1 were persuaded that it was important to his 
health an instant visit to Paris, and that I was to go 
on Monday if he was ready. He was very good- 
humoured, and affected to think that 1 should never 
come back alive from France ; it was death to go. 
But he had been looking for two years for somebody 
to go to Italy with, and was ready to set out at once, 
if 1 would go there. ... He gave me a cordial 
invitation to his lodgings (in Buckingham Place), 
where 1 promised to visit him before I went away." 

' Cabot's Memoir of%alph IValdo Emerson. 



76 ^enn?6on* 

There is ample testimony that Tennyson was not 
at this time or ever the unsocial man he has been 
called. In Thoreau's phrase, he was glad of all the 
society he could get to go up with, but he would 
have nothing to do with society that kept or pulled 
him down. He felt no temptation to fritter away 
his time in the '' little arts of happiness." Even as a 
child, great thoughts had taken quaint precedence in 
his mind ; witness his advice to his brother to over- 
come a boyish diffidence by thinking of Herschel's 
great star-patches. He was a much-loved member of 
the Sterling Club, and very likely he was "petted " 
and "indulged" by the old "Apostles," who were 
pardonably proud of him, but there is no evidence that 
he was spoiled — in the common acceptance of the 
term. Emerson, however, coming straight from the 
society he found in the passengers of the lumbering 
Concord coach, from companionship with Thoreau, 
who was " with difficulty sweet," from the little 
knot of plain livers and high thinkers who drifted to 
the wooded town, was inevitably struck with a sense 
of mighty contrast. 

Tennyson had every reason for clinging to his 
habits of industry and declining self-indulgence. 
Aside from his ambition as a poet, he had the young 
man's not unusual impulse toward success ; he was 
engaged to Miss Sellwood, without money enough 
as yet to marry. With the hope, no doubt, of 
hastening things, he put his little inheritance into a 
wood-carving scheme, which promptly collapsed 



u 



Zl)c pvlnceeQ,*' anb parallel ipaseaaee* 77 



and carried with it his money and much of his 
courage. He became positively ill, and hypochondria 
threatened. Very likely it was sympathy with this 
misfortune that stirred up his friends to act for him in 
the matter of a pension. The story of the episode 
runs as follows : Without Tennyson's knowledge 
or consent, Milnes was appealed to as having in- 
fluence with Sir Robert Peel, to urge the poet's claim 
to an annuity sufficient to provide his daily bread and 
give the freedom of mind coveted, if not actually 
needed, by the writer of verse. Some of the many 
books about Tennyson have represented Milnes as 
very eager and valiant in this service, but the truth 
seems to be that at first he did not particularly 
enjoy the part he had to play. Most men who do 
not like to ask money for themselves like only a little 
less to ask it for others. "It was not until Milnes 
had played the part of devil's advocate," remarks his 
biographer, ''that he ever heartily espoused any 
cause." Carlyle prodded him after his own fashion. 

'''Richard Milnes,' said Carlyle one day, with- 
drawing his pipe from his mouth, as they were seated 
together in the little house in Cheyne Row, ' when 
are you going to get that pension for Alfred Tenny- 
son ?' 

"'My dear Carlyle,' responded Milnes, 'the 
thing is not so easy as you seem to suppose. What 
will my constituents say if I do get the pension for 
Tennyson ? They know nothing about him or his 
poetry, and they will probably think he is some poor 



78 zrenn?0on» 

relation of my own, and that the whole affair is a 
job.' 

''Solemn and emphatic was Carlyle's response. 
* Richard Milnes, on the Day of Judgment, when 
the Lord asks you why you did n't get that pension 
for Alfred Tennyson, it will not do to lay the blame 
on your constituents ; it is you that will be 
damned.'"^ 

Milnes finally consented to do what he could, and 
being in he bore himself bravely. There were two 
applications for a pension of two hundred pounds 
made to Peel, Tennyson's, and one for Sheridan 
Knowles, who was old, infirm, and poor. Peel was 
at that moment head over ears in Irish questions and 
knew nothing of either man. Milnes told him that 
if the pension were to be bestowed as charity, 
Knowles should have it ; but if it were to be bestowed 
in the interests of English literature and the nation at 
large, it should go to Tennyson beyond all question. 
Then he sent the 1842 volumes to the Prime Minister, 
* ' Locksley Hall " and ' ' Ulysses " marked. Mr. Brown- 
ing afterwards said that he thought the latter poem 
must have " come home to Peel, then at the height 
of his power and prosperity, as an image of his own 
spirited, active, contentious life." At all events, 
Peel's choice fell upon Tennyson, but it is a pleasing 
relief to know that subsequently Knowles also re- 
ceived a pension of the same amount, — two hundred 
pounds. 

* Wemyss Reid's Life of Lord Houghton. 



''Zbc Ipdnceee/' anb parallel paeeagee* 79 

Tennyson, himself, only half liked his good 
fortune, and expressed himself as feeling ''the least 
bit possible Miss Martineau-ish " about it, Miss 
Martineau having refused a pension on the ground 
that she should be robbing the people who did not 
make laws for themselves. This particular argu- 
ment, however, Tennyson considered nonsense, re- 
marking that her non-acceptance of the pension "did 
not save the people a stiver," and that if the people 
did make laws for themselves no literary man would 
ever get a lift.^ 

It is, perhaps, hard for an American to understand 
that this was not an unnatural attitude, though so 
unfamiliar to American poets. One can hardly 
imagine Lowell advocating an unearned "lift" for 
literary men, although he seemed to feel quite at 
liberty to marry on an income that could not have 
amounted to much more than a thousand dollars a 
year, and gayly confessed his inability to live on it. 
He had, however, sufficient knowledge of our human 
nature to admit that "few of us would hold an 
umbrella, at any rate right side up, against a golden 
shower." The difference is probably more in the 
point of view than in the essential nature of the men, 
for Tennyson, we learn from his son, "never could 
or would write a line for money offered," while 
Lowell accepted, though much against his will, a 
salary for his Anti-Slavery articles, and wrote for a 
number of years under a feeling of restriction. 

* Hallam Tennyson's Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 



8o XTenn^aon* 

Edward Lytton Bulwer was very ungracious 
about the golden shower which had fallen upon a 
young man without a family to support, and wrote a 
poem containing the following sharp lines : 

** Let schoolmiss Alfred vent her chaste delight 
In darling little rooms so warm and bright, 
Chant * I 'm a-weary ' in infectious strain, 
And catch 'the blue fly singing i' the pane/ 

Tho' praised by critics and admired by Blues, 
Tho' Peel with pudding plump the puling Muse, 
Tho' Theban taste the Saxon purse controls 
And pensions Tennyson while starves a Knowles." 

Unfortunately, Tennyson could not suffer the 
attack in silence, not being of those who can ** dis- 
miss what insults the soul " without a protest. He 
replied with ''The New Timon and the Poets," a 
mere doggerel ending with this edifying stanza : 

** What profits how to understand 
The merits of a spotless shirt — 
A dapper boot — a little hand — 
If half the little soul is dirt ? " 

His admirers will get comfort from the assurance in 
the Memoir that his friend — ''Save us from our 
friends ! " — ^John Forster, and not he himself, sent 
the lines to Punch, Immediately after, he sent 
another poem conceived in dignity. It commenced : 

"Ah God! the petty fools of rhyme 

That shriek and sweat in pigmy wars 
Before the stony face of Time, 
And look'd at by the silent stars ; '* 

and ended with the candid admission : 



'*Zbe pvinccee/' anb iparallel ipaeeagee* Si 

** And I, too, talk, and lose the touch 
I talk of. Surely, after all, 
The noblest answer unto such 

Is perfect stillness when they brawl." 

The episode was humiliating, but Tennyson was 
too large in spirit to cherish petty animosities, and he 
and Lytton were afterwards friends. 

In 1847, Tennyson added "The Golden Year" to 
the fourth edition of the Poems and the same year 
published his first long poem, which he called The 
Princess, A Medley, His friends were somewhat 
imprudently demanding a long poem, and he naturally 
wished to find an original and suitable theme. The 
" Woman Question " provided one ; it was already 
in the air, but there had been no general infection. 
Two years later Alexander Scott declared that 
"female education" was a perfectly untried ex- 
periment, and therefore peculiarly interesting ; and 
Clara Balfour, lecturing on the subject, took the very 
modest and extremely conservative ground that 
"really good and solid education does but enable a 
woman to perform the most trifling duties of domes- 
tic life more thoroughly well, and why should it 
make her more vain and pedantic than an equally 
educated man ? " England in the main was taken up 
with Irish problems, and Tennyson's poem was 
decidedly in advance of its hour. The precise sug- 
gestion from which it sprang has been variously 
traced. Mr. Wace and others think they have 
hunted it to this passage from Dr. Johnson's Rasselas : 



82 ^enn?6om 

"The Princess thought that of all sublunary 
things, knowledge was the best. She desired first 
to learn of sciences, and then proposed to found a 
college to teach women, in which she would 
preside." 

In the Memoir there is mention of an old college 
joke commemorated in a few gleeful stanzas ; and 
the converse of the idea may be found in Love's 
Labour 's Lost, where the King affirms : 

"Our Court shall be a little Academe, 
Still and contemplative in living art. 
You three, Birone, Dumaine, and Longaville, 
Have sworn for three years' term to live with me. 
My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes 
That are recorded in this schedule here : " 

the statutes reading, '' Not to see ladies, study, fast, 
not sleep." It was not within Shakespeare's pro- 
vince to turn the thing around, but had it been, 
what a comedy we might have owned to put beside 
The Taming of the Shrew ! 

Whatever its source. The Princess was a gay 
mingling of theory and fancy, luxuriant description, 
teasing analyses of improbable states of mind, ro- 
mance, and humour. It was not remarkably well re- 
ceived by the English critics. FitzGerald hated it, 
as Tennyson had foreseen he would, and wrote to 
Frederick Tennyson in 1848: " I am considered a 
great heretic for abusing it, but it seems to me a 
wretched waste of power at a time of life when 
a man ought to be doing his best, and I almost feel 



44 



Zbc iprinceaa/' anJ) parallel paeaagee. s^ 



hopeless about Altred now. I mean about his doing 
what he was born to do." 

The verdict of Mrs. Browning also was unflatter- 
ing. Writing to Miss Mitford about housekeeping in 
the Guidi Palace, and shopping for chairs and tables 
with the author of Strafford and Sordello, she winds 
up with : '' At last we have caught sight of Tenny- 
son's 'Princess,' and I may or must profess to be a 
good deal disappointed. What woman will tell the 
great poet that Mary Wollstonecraft herself never 
dreamt of setting up collegiate states, proctordoms, 
and the rest, which is a worn-out plaything in the 
hands of one sex already, and need not be transferred 
in order to be proved ridiculous ? As for the poetry, 
beautiful in some parts, he never seems to me to come 
up to his own highest mark in the rhythm especially. 
The old blank verse of Tennyson was a divine thing; 
but this — new-mounted for certain critics — may please 
them better than it pleases me. Still the man is Ten- 
nyson, take him for all in all, and I never shall forgive 
whatever princesses of my sex may have ill-treated 
him." 

Miss Mitford, never too enthusiastic over Tenny- 
son, found the story ' ' very unskilfully told, with an en- 
tire want of dramatic power, and full of the strangest 
words brought in after the strangest fashion"; but she 
adds, "there are fine things in it." She reports the 
poet as vexed by small applause, and Mrs. Browning 
responds: ''Why did Mr. Harness and others who 
' never could understand ' his former divine works, 



84 ^enn?6on, 

praise this in manuscript until the poet's hope grew to 
the height of his ambition ? Strangely unfortunate ! " 

By 1850, however, three large editions of the poem 
had been sold, and Mrs. Browning, experienced in 
the business uncertainties of literature, declined longer 
to sympathise. *' If he is n't satisfied, after all," she 
writes, '' I think he is wrong. Divine poet as he is, 
and no laurel being too leafy for him, yet he must be 
an unreasonable man, and not understanding of the 
growth of the laurel-trees and the nature of a reading 
public." 

A very interesting review appeared in 1848 in the 
Massachusetts Quarterly. It was unsigned ; but 
from Lowell's Letters we learn that he was the au- 
thor. The praise is very high, but discriminating, 
and the tiresome expedient of ' ' explaining " the poem, 
which explains itself, is altogether ignored. After a 
preliminary tussle with ''Timms," who is supposed 
to represent the American ''Jeffrey," and who has 
pronounced The Princess an entire failure, the critic 
proceeds : 

'' In the first place, we must look at the poem not 
as the work of a beginner, but of an acknowledged 
poet, and of one who has gained his rank and main- 
tained it by the unerring certainty with which he has 
produced his effects, and his conscientious adherence 
to the truths of Art. We know of few poets in 
whose writings we have found that entire consist- 
ency which characterises those of Tennyson. His 
conception is always clear, his means exactly ade- 



4f 



ZTbe princeee/' anb parallel pasaagee. 85 



quate, and his finish perfect. So entirely free is he 
from any appearance of effort, that many have been 
led to underrate him, and to praise his delicacy at 
the expense of his strength. It is true that he never 
w^astesan atom of force. He never calls all his muscles 
into play for the plucking of a flower. Yet he is 
never found wanting to the demand of the occasion. 
Milo, with his fingers in the oak-cleft, made, after all, 
rather a sorry display of sinew. Though one chief 
characteristic of Tennyson's mind be a flowing grace, 
and a feminine sensitiveness to every finest sugges- 
tion of beauty ; though thought in him seems to be 
rather a luxury of sensation than an activity of intel- 
lect ; though his metres adapt themselves to every 
subtle winding of expression with the yielding free- 
dom of water, yet his outlines are always sharp-cut 
and severe. Perfection of form seems to be with 
him a natural instinct, not an attainment. We must 
therefore regard The Princess as the work of a master, 
and it must argue a poverty in ourselves if we can- 
not see it as a harmonious whole. For so perfect 
is Tennyson's appreciation of his own strength, that he 
has never in a single instance fallen below himself. 
His self-command is not the least wonderful quality 
in him. 

"The growth of the poem is as natural as its plan 
is original. The gradual absorption of the author in 
his subject, till what was begun as a song 'turns out 
a sermon,' the growing predominance of the poet 
over the mere story-teller, as the higher relations of 



86 ^enn?0on. 

his subject appeal to him, and the creative faculty 
feels itself more and more taxed, are exquisitely true 
to the intellect and the heart. We know of no other 
man who could have mingled the purely poetical 
with the humorous in such entire sympathy as no- 
where to suggest even a suspicion of incongruity. 
But Tennyson's humour is peculiar to himself. It is 
as refined as all the other parts of his mental consti- 
tution. We were about to compare it with Chaucer's. 
It is as genial and simple, but not so robust. It has 
more of the polish of society. It is like Addison's, 
etherealised and sublimated by the poetic sense. It 
has none of that boisterousness which generally goes 
with it when it is the predominant quality of the 
mind. It is not a laugh, but a quiet smile and a light 
in the eyes. It is a delicate flower which we can 
perceive and enjoy, but which escapes definition. In 
short, it is Tennyson's. If we take by itself any one 
of the little touches of humour scattered through The 
Princess, it will seem nothing extraordinary, and we 
shall wonder whither its charm has flown, so per- 
fectly and artistically dependent on each other are all 
parts of this delicious poem. For Art is like the in- 
vention of the arch. Each piece, taken singly, has no 
especial fitness. The material is no rarer than that of 
the Cyclopean doorway, two upright blocks with a 
third laid across the top. Nor is the idea less simple 
after we have once found it out. We feel this book 
to be so true an expression of the man, its humour is 
so thoroughly a part of him, and leads up to or falls 



*'Zbc prlnce00/' anb parallel ipasaagee* 87 

off from the higher and graver passages with so grace- 
ful an undulation, that the whole poem would suffer 
vitally by losing the least shade of it. It subsides 
out of the story as unobtrusively as it had entered, 
at the moment when the interest, becoming concen- 
trated in the deeper moral to which the poem is natu- 
rally drawn, necessarily excludes it. The progress 
of the poem is carried forward, and its movement 
modulated with the truest feeling and tact. It is as 
if some composer, in a laughing mood, had seated 
himself at the organ to fantasy for the entertainment 
of a few friends. At first he is conscious of their 
presence, and his fingers run lightly over the keys, 
bringing out combinations of notes swayed quaintly 
hither and thither by the magnetism of the moment. 
But gradually he becomes absorbed in his own power 
and that of his instrument. The original theme re- 
curs less and less often, till at last he soars quite 
away from it on the uplifting wings of his art. 

"One striking excellence of Tennyson's poetry, 
as noticeable in The Princess as elsewhere, is its 
repose and equilibrium. There is nowhere the least 
exaggeration. We are never distracted by the noise 
of the machinery. No one beauty is so prominent as 
to divide the effect, and to prevent our receiving the 
full pleasure arising from our perception of complete- 
ness. The leading idea keeps all the rest in perfect 
subjection. He never gives us too much. With 
admirable instinct he always stops short where the 
reader's imagination may be safely trusted to suggest 



88 zrenn?0om 

all the minor accessories of a thought or a situation. 
He gives all that is essential, not all that he can. He 
never indulges his invention with two images where 
one is enough. And this self-denial, this entire sub- 
ordination of the author to his work, has been re- 
markable in him from the first. It marks the sincere 
artist, and is worthy of all praise. If some of his 
earlier poems were chargeable with slight excesses of 
mannerism, it was only the mannerism natural to a 
mind which felt itself to be peculiar, and was too 
hasty in asserting its peculiarity before it had learned 
to discriminate clearly between the absolute and the 
accidental. But he has long since worked himself 
clear of this defect and is now only a mannerist 
because he is a Tennyson. 

*'The profound and delicate conception of female 
character for which Tennyson is distinguished, and 
which, from the nice structure of his mind, we should 
expect to find in him, is even more perfectly developed 
in The Princess than hitherto. It miarks the wisdom 
of the man no less than the insight of the poet. 
Whatever any woman may think of the conclusions 
he arrives at, she cannot help being grateful to the 
man who has drawn the Lady Psyche and Ida. 

''The design of The Princess is novel. The 
movement of the poem is epic, yet it is redolent, not 
of Homer and Milton, but of the busy nineteenth 
century. There are glimpses of contemporary man- 
ners and modes of thought, and a metaphysical 
question is argued, though without infringing upon 



4( 



Zbc pvinccee,** anb parallel pa^eagee. 



the freedom of the story. Indeed, it is the story 
itself which argues. On the whole we consider this 
to be the freest and fullest expression of Tennyson 
which we have had. The reader will find in it all 
the qualities for which he is admirable, so blended 
and interfused as to produce a greater breadth of effect 
than he has elsewhere achieved. 

''The familiarity of some passages, while it is in 
strict keeping with the character he assumes at the 
outset, indicates the singer at last sure of his audi- 
ence, and reposing on the readiness of their sympa- 
thies." 

This criticism contains substantially all that has 
been said in favour of The Princess. The poem 
seems on the whole to have gained with time, and 
those who do not take it too seriously, and do not 
hunt too persistently for its precise pedagogic inten- 
tion, may comfortably enjoy its oddity, its freakish, 
irresponsible strain, so unlike anything else permitted 
by the intellectual conscience of its author. Perhaps 
to a world that reads without '' reviewing," its chief 
recommendation is the pervading humour which 
attracted Lowell, and which seems to separate this 
one poem from the mass of Tennyson's work. Mr. 
Traill, indeed, finds Tennyson satisfactorily humor- 
ous throughout. Without a deep sense of humour, 
he argues, the poet would never have been able to 
keep the balance in his work and avoid the extrava- 
gant and the ridiculous. While he recognises the 
absence of the light touch corresponding in literature 



90 ^enni?6on* 

to the ready repartee in talk, he finds abundance of 
what he calls the ' ' sympathetic humour " with which 
Dickens and Thackeray were endowed. Not only 
does the " Northern Farmer" delight him, as well it 
may, with its large comedy ; but '' Will Waterproofs 
Monologue " is deliciously amusing to him. All of 
which in the present case serves to demonstrate the 
old truth : You may lead a reader to a joke, but 
you cannot make him laugh. To a less buoyant in- 
telligence than that of Mr. Traill, Tennyson's best fun, 
compared, for example, with Thackeray's "White 
Squall," which ends as suddenly as the squall, in 
tears, shows plainly the contrast between the some- 
what elaborate and self-conscious wit of an essen- 
tially unhumorous mind, and humour that is of the 
essence. 

FitzGerald said, apropos of the absurd little poem 
''The Skipping Rope," ''Alfred, whatever he may 
think, cannot trifle ; his smile is rather a grim one." 
Grim is not the most fitting adjective for "The Skip- 
ping Rope " ; but in spite of Mr. Traill's delightful 
argument, it is difficult not to side with FitzGerald and 
deny Tennyson's claim to the real thing in humour. 
A certain detachment of spirit, the power to see one- 
self small and far off, seems to go with that percep- 
tion of congruities and incongruities which makes 
for humour of the more subtle sort, and of such de- 
tachment Tennyson was innocent. To use Pater's 
phrase, there is in his lighter poetry a " misconception 
of the perfect manner," a missing of "the delicate 



*'Zbc prlnceee/' an& Iparallcl paeeagee* 91 

shade of unconcern " that marks the " perfect man- 
ner." He took his poetry rather solemnly, if not, as 
Froissart says his countrymen take their pleasures, 
sadly. He could not let it slip joyously from him as 
Lowell did ; a reason, perhaps, why he, more than 
Lowell, needed a pension. He felt the responsibility 
of being a poet, and he tilled his field so assiduously 
that there were few spontaneous growths of weedy 
fun. When he tried for sheer levity the result was 
amazing. His gambolling in such poems as ''The 
Amphion " and ''The Golden Goose," is about as 
airy as Wordsworth's jaunty couplet : 

** I've measured it from side to side, 
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide." 

But it was characteristic of him absolutely to con- 
tradict himself from time to time, and show himself 
capable of success precisely where one had grown 
accustomed to failure. The possibilities for badinage 
and high spirits in the treatment of The Princess 
irresistibly appealed to him. Lovely as the Princess 
is, stately and charming, Tennyson has succeeded in 
making her father's mental attitude sufficiently con- 
vincing when he proclaims that 

" awful odes she wrote, 



Too awful, sure, for what they treated of, 
But all she is and does is awful." 

And it is quite easy to give an affirmative answer 
when Mr. Traill inquires persuasively if you do not 
feel, as you listen to the placid murmur of the 



92 zrenni?6on» 

stream of humour rippling through the poem, ''that 
already, well-nigh fifty years ago, this poet had 
penetrated to the heart of that great Woman Question 
which is agitating so many humourless minds at the 
present day, and that he has reached it by the aid of 
the only guide that knows the way to it — by the 
power of humorous sympathy ? " ^ 

Stopford Brooke, more emancipated, perhaps, than 
Mr. Traill, does not reach perfect contentment with 
Tennyson's attitude toward the ''Question." Ida 
surrendered too much, he thinks, when that 

** something wild within her breast, 



A greater than all knowledge, beat her down," 

and the prince accepted "too much of masterhood." 
Nor did the poet make allowance for the women 
who have no homes and "are hungry to become 
themselves, to realise themselves in the life and 
movement of the whole." Emphatically true. The 
attitude of the waning last decade of the century was 
not attained in Tennyson's poem of 1847 ; but the 
reader who remembers that poets are human, and 
that Tennyson was nearing his own ideal of a home 
and marriage with the woman he had loved for more 
than a dozen years, will hardly wonder at his over- 
looking the unmarrying element in society. 

In 1850, the " Songs " were added to The Princess. 
Charles Kingsley describes them as follows : 

"At the end of the first canto, fresh from the 

* " Tennyson as a Humourist," Nineteenth Century, May, 1894. 



*'Zhc princesa/' anb parallel ipaeeagea, 93 

description of the female college with its profes- 
soresses, and hostleresses, and other Utopian mon- 
sters, we turn the page, and — 

' As thro' the land at eve we went, 

O there above the little grave, 
We kiss'd again with tears.* 

''Between the next two cantos intervenes the 
well-known cradle-song, perhaps the best of all ; and 
at the next interval is the equally well-known bugle- 
song, the idea of which is that of twin-labour and 
twin-fame in a pair of lovers. In the next, the sight 
of the fallen hero's child opens the sluices of his 
widow's tears ; and in the last the poet has suc- 
ceeded in the new edition in superadding a new form 
of emotion to a canto in which he seemed to have 
exhausted every resource of pathos which his 
subject allowed."^ 

In these songs we are reminded that for Tennyson 
poetry was music. To read them carefully is to mar- 
vel at the flawless expression of exquisite sentiment. 
Nothing could be more tenderly developed than their 
simplicity, and if anything is wanting in them it is 
the avenue of escape into the peccable world. Their 
workmanship is full of fine detail, like some fragment 
of choicest cloisonne. Among other things to be 
observed is the poet's fondness for the lingual, I, and 
its influence upon his verse. 

* Fraser's tMaga^ine, September, 1 850. 



94 ?renni20oa 

For 

*' Low, low, breathe and blow, 
Wind of the western sea ! 
Over the rolling waters go," 

try reading, 

** Go, go, breathe and go. 

Wind of the western sea ! 1 



or read 
for 



Over the rocking waters go "; 
'■' The sunbeam shakes across the lakes,** 



" The long light shakes across the lakes," 

to find how subtly the melodious charm of the sylla- 
bles is gained. Whoever reads Tennyson in German 
may multiply such comparisons. Take for example 
the passage in ''The Marriage of Geraint," where 
Enid's singing is likened to the sweet voice of a bird 
that 

** Heard by the lander in a lonely isle. 
Moves him to think what kind of bird it is 
That sings so delicately clear," 

and try to recognise the liquid music of the first and 
third lines in these sibilants and gutturals : 

*' Auf fernem Inselstrand ein Schiffer hort, 
Und lauscht und sinnt wess' Art der Vogelsei 
Der so bezaubernd singt." 

Sometimes the insistence on the liquid note is too 
monotonous, as where the Prince sings, ''maiden- 
like," 

" O Swallow, Swallow, flying, flying South, 
Fly to her and fall upon her gilded eaves 
And tell her, tell her, what 1 tell to thee"; 



'*Zhc Ipdnce60/' anb parallel pasaagee. 95 

but for the most part it is used with infinite skill and 
charm to the end not merely of The Princess but of 
the whole long melody down to 

" The mellow lin-lan-lone of evening bells." 

If Tennyson delighted in the letter /, he abhorred 
the sibilant s, and in the Memoir his son quotes him 
as declaring that he '' never put two ' ss ' together in 
any verse." ''My line is not," he said, "as often 
quoted, 

* And freedom broadens slowly down/ 
but 

* And freedom slowly broadens down.' " 

It is not surprising to find this rather extravagant 
statement contradicted here and there in The Prin- 
cess, as well as in the later poems. We find, for 
example, 

*' Who shines so in the corner," 

and 

*' The blood 
Was sprinkled on your kirtle," 

and 

"Are castles shadows ? Three of them ? Is she 
The sweet proprietress a shadow ? " 

and 

" As strangely as it came," 

as random exceptions to the professed rule of '' kick- 
ing the geese out of the boat. " A writer in Scribner's 
Maga:(ine has cited further examples of " Homer nod- 
ding," and has also pointed out that Shakespeare, 
who was tolerably well acquainted with the art of 



96 ^enn?9on» 

blank verse, had no such hostile feeling toward sibila- 
tion. '' He did not ' kick the geese out of the boat,' 
he only taught them when and where to hiss." 

In Mr. Dawson's Study of '' The Princess " atten- 
tion is called to the essential correspondence of cer- 
tain passages in the poem with passages in the poems 
of Shelley and Wordsworth. 

This passage, 

" A wind arose and rush'd upon the South, 
And shook the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks 
Of the wild woods together ; and a Voice 
Went with it, 'Follow, follow, thou shalt win ' "; 

is compared with this from Shelley's Prometheus 
Unbound : 

** A wind arose among the pines ; it shook 
The clinging music from their boughs, and then 
Low, sweet, faint sounds, like the farewell of ghosts, 
W^ere heard : ' Oh follow, follow, follow me ! ' " 

Again this passage, 

*' He has a solid base of temperament ; 
But as the water-lily starts and slides 
Upon the level in little puffs of wind, 
Tho' anchor'd to the bottom, such is he," 

has certainly the look of deriving from this in Words- 
worth's Excursion : 

" And, like the water-lily, lives and thrives. 
Whose root is fixed in stable earth, whose head 
Floats on the tossing waves." 

This drew from Tennyson a very interesting letter. 
*' Your explanatory notes are very much to the pur- 



► 



u 



Zbe prlnce60/' anb parallel paeeagee* 97 



pose," he wrote, ''and 1 do not object to your find- 
ing parallelisms. They must always occur. A man 
(a Chinese scholar) some time ago wrote to me say- 
ing that in an unknown, untranslated Chinese poem 
there were two whole lines of mine almost word for 
word ! ^ Why not ? Are not human eyes all over 
the world looking at the same objects, and must there 
not consequently be coincidences of thought and im- 
pressions and expressions ? It is scarcely possible 
for anyone to say or write anything in this late time 
of the world to which, in the rest of the literature of 
the world, a parallel could not somewhere be found. 
But when you say that this passage or that was sug- 
gested by Wordsworth or Shelley, or another, 1 de- 
mur ; and more, I wholly disagree. There was a 
period in my life when, as an artist, Turner for in- 
stance, takes rough sketches of landskip, etc., in 
order to work them eventually into some great pict- 
ure, so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or 
five words or more, whatever might strike me as 
picturesque in Nature. I never put these down, and 

' The iMetnoir states that the two lines referred to were from " The Voice and 
the Peak " : 

" The Peak is high and the stars are high, 
And the thought of a man is higher." 

May it not be possible that the Chinese verse was the one written by Yang 
Ta-nien and recently translated by Mr. Herbert A. Giles, which runs as follows, in the 
English version : 

" Upon this tall pagoda's peak 

My hands can nigh the stars enclose ; 
I dare not raise my voice to speak 
For fear of startling God's repose " ? 

The idea is certainly similar, and had the Chinese lines been literally tollowed they 
might have corresponded more closely with Tennyson's. 



98 zrenni?6on» 

many and many a line has gone away on the north 
wind, but some remain ; e.g. : 

'A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight' 

Suggestion. 

''The sea one night at Torquay, when Torquay 
was the most lovely sea-village in England, tho' now 
a smoky town. The sky was covered with thin va- 
pour, and the moon behind it. 

'As the water-lily starts and slides.' 

Suggestion, 

''Water-lilies on my own pond, seen on a gusty 
day with my own eyes. They did start and slide in 
the sudden puffs of wind till caught and stayed by 
the tether of their own stalks, quite as true as Words- 
worth's simile and more in detail. 

* A wild wind shook, 



Follow, follow, thou shalt win.' 

Suggestion. 

" I was walking in the New Forest. A wind did 
arise and 

' Shake the songs, the whispers and the shrieks 
Of the wild wood together.' 

"The wind I believe was a west wind, but because 
I wished the Prince to go south, 1 turned the wind 
to the south, and naturally the wind said 'follow.' 



'*Z\)e ipnnceee/' anb parallel paesaGca* 99 

I believe the resemblance which you note is just a 
chance one. Shelley's lines are not familiar to me, 
tho' of course if they occur in the Prometheus I must 
have read them. 1 could multiply instances, but I 
will not bore you, and far indeed am I from asserting 
that books as well as Nature are not, and ought not 
to be, suggestive to the poet. 1 am sure that I my- 
self, and many others, find a peculiar charm in those 
passages of such great masters as Virgil or Milton 
where they adopt the creation of a bygone poet and 
re-clothe it, more or less, according to their own 
fancy. But there is, I fear, a prosaic set growing up 
among us, editors of booklets, bookworms, index- 
hunters, or men of great memories and no imagina- 
tion, who impute themselves to the poet, and so 
believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is for 
ever poking his nose between the pages of some old 
volume in order to see what he can appropriate. 
They will not allow one to say 'Ring the bell,' 
without finding that we have taken it from P. Sidney, 
or even to use such a simple expression as the ocean 
'roars,' without finding out the precise verse in 
Homer or Horace from which we have plagiarised it 
(fact!)." 

This letter, though addressed to Mr. Dawson, is 
an all-sufficient response to a very different class of 
commentators ; those who, wishing Tennyson less 
and lower than he is in the judgment of his admirers, 
have fastened the charge of plagiarism upon him at 
the merest hint of parallelism. Some of the sug- 

l.ofC. 



loo ^enn?0on^ 

gestions made in this connexion are extremely 
amusing and not a little aggravating. 

It is discovered, for example, that ''Crossing the 
Bar " closely resembles the death-scene in Domhey 
and Son ; and the charming simile in '' Locksley Hall," 

** On her pallid cheek and lorehead came a colour and a light 
As 1 have seen the rosy red flushing in the northern night, 

is found with a few unimportant elemental changes 
in Uhland's '' Minstrel's Curse " : 

" Der Konig furchtbar prachtig, wie blut'ger Nordlichtschein." 

There are cases, however, in which the resem- 
blance is very striking, and these have an interest of 
their own which has nothing at all to do with the re- 
volting question of plagiarism. Lowell's comment 
upon the subject in his essay on Milton is a fine ex- 
ample of precisely the right spirit in which to treat 
them : 

'' If there is one thing more striking than another 
in this poet," he says, "it is that his great and orig- 
inal imagination was almost wholly nourished by 
books, perhaps I should rather say set in motion by 
them. It is wonderful how, from the most withered 
and juiceless hint gathered in his reading, his grand 
images rise like an exhalation ; how from the most 
battered old lamp caught in that huge drag-net with 
which he swept the waters of learning, he could con- 
jure a tall genius to build his palaces. Whatever he 



**Zbe princesa,;' anb parallel paeaagce^ loi 

touches swells and towers. That wonderful passage 
in Comics of the airy tongues, perhaps the most imag- 
inative in suggestion he ever wrote, was conjured 
out of a dry sentence in Purchas's abstract of Marco 
Polo. Such examples help us to understand the poet. 
When I find that Sir Thomas Browne had said before 
Milton that Adam ' was the wisest of all men since,' I 
am glad to find this link between the most profound 
and the most stately imagination of that age. Such 
parallels sometimes give a hint also of the historical 
development of our poetry, of its apostolical succes- 
sion, so to speak. Everyone has noticed Milton's 
fondness for sonorous proper names, which have not 
only an acquired imaginative value by association, 
and so serve to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but 
have likewise a merely musical significance. This 
he probably caught from Marlowe, traces of whom 
are frequent in him. There is certainly something of 
what afterwards came to be called Miltonic in more 
than one passage of Tamburlaine, a play in which 
gigantic force seems struggling from the block, as in 
Michel Angelo's Dawn'' 

If, then, we entirely dismiss the question of pla- 
giarism, we shall find a perfectly legitimate pleasure 
either in tracing the influence of other minds upon 
Tennyson's or in observing how the same ideas are 
apt to clothe themselves in very similar words under 
the direction of totally different intelligences. It is 
interesting, for example, to find how closely the sen- 
timent of the lovely lyric in The Princess, 



I02 ZTennijeom 

'* Home they brought her warrior dead: 
She nor swoon'd nor utter'd cry : 
All her maidens, watching, said, 
* She must weep or she will die.' 

** Rose a nurse of ninety years, 
Set his child upon her knee — 
Like summer tempest came her tears — 
' Sweet my child, I live for thee,' " 

resembles the sentiment of this passage in Scott's 
Lay of the Last Minstrel : 

** O'er her warrior's bloody bier 
The Ladye dropp'd nor flower nor tear! 

Until, amid his sorrowing clan, 

Her son lisped from the nurse's knee, — 

' And if I live to be a man 

My Father's death revenged shall be ! ' 

Then fast the mother's tears did seek 

To dew the infant's kindling cheek." 

Not only is Tennyson's version much more beau- 
tiful metrically, but the little warlike touch in the 
baby's words did not occur to him, or if it occurred 
did not commend itself. The tears are there, but no 
revenge, no martial infants 

In Scott's IVoodstock is also a passage that runs 
fairly parallel with a part of the '' Ode on the Death of 
the Duke of Wellington." If either pass into immor- 
tality it will probably be the latter, by virtue of the 
fervently religious inspiration of the closing lines, an 
exquisite expression of the joy over and above the 
victory of holiness : 



u 



Zbc princeee/' anb parallel paeeagee, 103 



" But Duty guides not that way — see her stand 
With wand entwined with amaranth, near yon cliffs. 
Oft where she leads thy blood must mark thy footsteps, 
Oft where she leads thy head must bear the storm, 
And thy shrunk form endure heat, cold, and hunger ; 
But she will guide thee up to noble heights 
Which he who gains seems native of the sky." 

Scott, Woodstock, 

" Not once or twice in our fair island story 
The path of duty was the way to glory ; 
He that ever following her commands. 
On with toil of heart and knees and hands, 
Thro' the long gorge to the far light has won 
His path upward, and prevail'd. 
Shall find the toppling crags of Duty scaled 
Are close upon the shining table-lands 
To which our God Himself is moon and sun." 
" Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington." 

A metrical correspondence is found between the 
famous song in Matid and this by Dryden : 

" Shall I marry the man I love ? 

And shall 1 conclude my pains ? 
Now bless'd be the Powers above, 

I feel the blood bound in my veins ; 
With a lively leap it began to bound 

And the vapours leave my brains." 

A metaphor in the '' Morte d'Arthur," 

** For so the whole round world is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God," 

occurs also in Archdeacon Hare's sermon on The Law 
of Self-Sacrifice : ''This is the golden chain of love 
whereby the whole creation is bound to the throne 



I04 ZCenni^eon^ 

of the Creator"; and in the Epilogue to ''Morte 
d'Arthur " is this expression : 

" On to dawn, when dreams 
Begin to feel the truth and stir of day " ; 

which certainly sufficiently resembles the line in 
Shelley's '^ Hellas," 

'' The truth of day lightens on my dreams," 

to suggest a derivation. 

Some of these parallel passages ^ are very plausibly 
accounted for on the theory of recurrent ideas, or 
"cycles of thought," as Dr. Holmes puts it. Most 
of us remember his story of meeting Mrs. Sigourney 
and replying to her pleasant reference to his many 
wanderings with the remark: ''Yes, 1 am like the 
Huma, the bird that never lights, being always in the 
cars as he is always on the wing." Years passed, 
the same place was visited. Another meeting with 
Mrs. Sigourney. "You are constantly going from 
place to place, " she said. ' ' Yes, " he answered, " I am 
like the Huma," and finished the sentence as before. 

In the same way a mind steeped in poetry may 
retain lines once read and reproduce them in their 
general form after all remembrance of the reading has 
passed away. Such forgetfulness is no more astonish- 
ing than that of some of Tennyson's critics, two of 
whom record having been challenged by him with 

' I cannot claim them as the reward of my own " undiscourageable search " ; 
most of them, in fact all that 1 have quoted, I think, and many more, were dis- 
covered by contributors to C^otes and Queries. — Author. 



''Zbc Iprince69/' anb parallel paasaQce* 105 

writing certain passages which they could not in the 
least recall. 

Alfred Austin, the present Laureate, is one of these, 
and writes of the incident in his article on " Tenny- 
son's Literary Sensitiveness ^ " : 

'''I never could see I am so like Keats,' he 
[Tennyson] once said to me, as we were walking 
alone in his garden. 

'' ' Who said you are like Keats ? ' 

'' ' You did, and you said I had taken a line from 
Keats and spoiled it. But it does n't matter now.' 

'' 1 had completely forgotten the circumstance." 

Certain parallelisms, too, are almost sure to occur 
where men of the same nationality look out upon the 
same scenes and are moved by them. When Butler 
writes : 

** Where'er you tread, your foot shall set 
The primrose and the violet," 

and Tennyson follows with this in Maud: 

" From the meadow your walks have left so sweet 
That whenever a March wind sighs 
He sets the jewel-print of your feet 
In violets blue as your eyes," 

it is not so much testimony in favour of conscious or 
unconscious imitation as a revelation of a certain 
aspect of the English meadows. In the same way 
Tennyson's line, 

"You scarce could see the grass for flowers," 

^National T^eview, 1892. 



io6 ^enn?6on» 

and Peele's, which is almost identical with it, 

" Ye may no see for peeping flowers the grasse/' 

might have occurred to any English poet who had 
once set eyes upon Chaucer's ''ground so proud " in 
its Spring robe 

"Of gras and floures, wide and pers, 
And many hewes ful dyvers." 

If we pass from single lines and passages to the 
subjects of the poems we find that Tennyson ap- 
parently cared very little whence came his sugges- 
tions, so long as they were suited to his poetic 
quality. He would take his inspiration with equal 
cheerfulness from a classic fable, a contemporary 
newspaper, or a personal experience ; and the excel- 
lence of the result did not depend at all upon the 
character of the source. It was Sir Henry Taylor who 
said of him : '' He wants a story to treat, being full 
of poetry with nothing to put it in." 




I 



CHAPTER VI. 
MARRIAGE AND LAUREATESHIP. 

BY the time The Princess was published Tenny- 
son had drawn his public about him, and his 
large popularity was well begun. He had 
been already translated into German, and in America, 
as we have seen, he was early known. Those '* fol- 
lowers of Emerson " had devoted the ardent spirit of 
their youth to spreading the new light among the 
new generation. One of the most enthusiastic and 
efficient of them was, we learn from Mr. Nor- 
ton, a Mr. Charles S. Wheeler, "a handsome blond 
youth, full of vigour, a lover of Nature, — introducing 
Thoreau even to some of her intimacies to which he 
had not then attained : a lover of books as well, and 
an excellent scholar for the time. From 1838 to 1842 
he was Instructor in History at Harvard, and Tutor in 
Greek. He edited the first American edition of Herodo- 
tus, and his editing showed both scholarship unusual 
for his age, and taste perhaps equally unusual. His 
soul was open to all the spiritual influences of the 

time, and he was one of Emerson's nearest friends 

107 



io8 ZCcnnijeon* 

and followers. 1 suppose that he might have been 
classed among the Transcendentalists, but he had a 
saving grace of common-sense which protected him 
from some of the follies, which in that period of spirit- 
ual ferment a good many of our best youth displayed. " 
He died in the June of 1843, before he was twenty- 
seven years old. In the fall of 1842 he wrote to 
Lowell from Heidelberg : 

" I must tell you that Tennyson has addressed me 
a very kind note since I took up my abode in Heidel- 
berg. 1 am going to copy out some paragraphs there- 
from, even at the risk of a vanity-tax. He says : ' 1 
am very glad to hear that you are in the old world, 
and indeed half inclined to be envious of those sensa- 
tions which belong to you as an American first set- 
ting foot among the ruins of ancient empires. Would 
that 1 could be with you and sympathise with your 
pleasure. I am only afraid that after the sunshine 
and colour and antiquities of Southern Europe our 
milder beauties and worse climate will disappoint any 
expectations you may have raised ; not the less 1 
ought not to forget that your bond with England is 
nearer and dearer than with Greece or Italy, and 1 do 
not fear that you will bring among us the spirit of 
Fenimore Cooper. 1 have full faith that you have 
made as good a bargain for me as was possible under 
the circumstances, and that your friend will manage 
as well as may be for my interests : these things will 
all be remedied with the progress of years, though per- 
haps the grass will wave over our graves before the 




Lady Tennyson. 

By G,F. Watts, R.A. 



flDarrlage anb Xaureateeblp^ 109 

coming of the better day. . . . When do you 
intend to visit England ? I suppose you can hardly 
tell at present. You must give me a little notice be- 
forehand, or I may be out of the v^ay, and I should 
be sorry to miss the pleasure of seeing you.' Very 
nice, is it not ? Tennyson mentions that he has not 
received a copy of the reprint, and that he would like 
to see one. Will you ask Ticknor whether one has 
been despatched, and see to it, if there has not ? " 

Altogether the keenest American estimate of Ten- 
nyson's poetry at this period was made by Emerson 
in those curiously plain-spoken, familiar letters to the 
American public, which he called English Traits. 

''Tennyson is endowed precisely in points where 
Wordsworth wanted," he says. '' There is no finer 
ear, nor more command of the keys of language. 
Colour, like the dawn, flows over the horizon from 
his pencil, in waves so rich that we do not miss the 
central form. Through all his refinements, too, he 
has reached the public, — a certificate of good sense 
and general power, since he who aspires to be the 
English poet must be as large as London, not in the 
same kind as London, but in his own kind. But he 
wants a subject, and climbs no mount of vision to 
bring its secrets to the people. He contents himself 
with describing the Englishman as he is and proposes 
no better. There are all degrees in poetry, and we 
must be thankful for every beautiful talent. But it 
is only a first success when the ear is gained. The 
best office of the best poets has been to show how 



I lo zrenn^^on* 

low and uninspired was their general style, and that 
only once or twice they have struck the high 
chord." 

During the later forties Tennyson travelled in 
Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1848 he was among 
the coves and quarries of Cornwall, with the subject 
of Arthur reviving in his mind. Miss Fox, in her 
journal, speaks of meeting Henry Hallam, who re- 
ported the poet's rapture over the Cornish scenery : 
''At one little place, Looe, where he arrived in the 
evening, he cried : ' Where is the sea ? Show me 
the sea ! ' So after the sea he went stumbling in the 
dark, and fell down and hurt his leg so much that he 
had to be nursed for six weeks by a surgeon there, 
who introduced some of his friends to him, and thus 
he got into a class of society entirely new to him, and 
when he left they gave him a series of introductions, 
so that instead of going to hotels, he was passed on 
from town to town, and abode with little grocers and 
shop-keepers along his line of travel. He says that 
he cannot have better got a true impression of the 
class and thinks the Cornish very superior to the 
generality. They all know about Tennyson, and had 
read his poems, and one miner hid behind a wall that 
he might see him. Tennyson hates being lionised, 
and even assumes bad health to avoid it." This 
story and the one in the Memoir about Samuel Bam- 
ford, the weaver, rather contradict a favourite im- 
pression that Tennyson is a poet for the cultivated 
only. He certainly did not stoop to the taste of the 



flDarriage anb Xaureateebip* m 

uncultivated, and many of his phrases must be unin- 
telligible to readers with a limited vocabulary ; but 
his poetry comes within the range of the many. A 
writer for the Spectator who said, after his death, 
that ''he bridged the gulf so often unnecessarily 
widened between the uneducated mind and the edu- 
cated," had the true conception of his gift, and very 
happily compared the effect upon an imperfectly 
furnished mind of the rich, ornate verse, to the pleas- 
ure given a poor man by ''a kind word or a visit 
from Royalty." It was this principle that led Mrs. 
Wiggin to put on her finest gown to read before an 
audience of charity children. And Mr. Stevenson 
followed it to its logical conclusion, when, in his 
paper on Popular Authors, he explained that the 
poor man does not, 'Mn his rare hours of rumina- 
tion " consider his own life as he lives it, ''but that 
other life, which was all lit up for him by the humble 
talent of a Hayward — that other life which, God 
knows, perhaps he still believes that he is leading — 
the life of Tom Holt." Tennyson's talent was not 
"the humble talent of a Hayward," but his own very 
splendid endowment ; nevertheless he performed this 
gentle office for the poor : he glorified their miserable 
lives, and made them Miller's Daughters, and Enoch 
Ardens, and Beggar Maids, to whom "in robe and 
crown the King stept down." 

In 1850, Tennyson published In Memoriam, at first 
anonymously. This poem, the manuscript of which 
was once lost in a London lodging-house, and rescued 



112 ^ennij0om 

by Mr. Coventry Patmore, marked a very important 
turning-point in Tennyson's life. He had been in- 
flexible in his loyalty to his vocation, and its pecu- 
niary rewards had not been swift to come. Now 
Moxon was willing to offer a satisfactory arrange- 
ment, and he at last felt justified in making Emily 
Sellwood his wife. On June 13, 1850, the wedding 
took place in Shiplake Church, of which Mr. James 
T. Fields got so charming an impression when he 
drove with Miss Mitford through laurel hedges to 
reach the '' superb pile, rich in painted glass windows 
and carved oak ornaments." Pictures of the church 
as it is now, do not, it is said, bear a very close re- 
semblance to the place as it must have looked to 
Tennyson and his bride. The ivy-covered tower is 
built of flint with '' large, roughly dressed blocks of 
chalk," and, with the north aisle, constitutes the 
oldest portion of the structure. For the rest, it was 
restored in 1870, and according to the ideas of rest- 
oration then prevalent, much was swept away which 
would probably now be retained.^ 

The wedding, Tennyson said, was ''the nicest" 
he had ever been at, and apparently was of the sim- 
plest kind. The account of it in the Memoir contains 
all the essential elements of delightful, wholesome 
romance, with a very modest and genuine tribute 
from Hallam Tennyson to her whom he '' loved as 
perfect mother and ' very woman of very woman.' " 
Concerning her very little has been written. She has 

* Church's The Laureate^ s Country. 



flDarriage anb Xaureateeblp. 113 

had no special halo cast about her, but the impres- 
sion gained from fragmentary descriptions is one of 
singular charm. Mrs. Fields recalls her as she was in 
the prime of life, standing in her hospitable doorway 
'' in her habitual and simple costume of a long grey 
dress and lace kerchief over her head. . . . Some- 
thing in her bearing and trailing dress, perhaps, gave 
her a medieval aspect which suited with the house." 
She lay on the couch, a '' slender, fair-haired lady," 
and sat at dinner '' in her soft white muslin dress tied 
with blue, at that time hardly whiter than her face 
or bluer than her eyes." Her boys, Hallam and 
Lionel, were born in 1852 and 1854, and in their black 
velvet dresses they looked to Mrs. Fields like Millais's 
picture of the princes in the Tower. 

At the Manchester exhibition of 1857, Hawthorne 
and his family ran across the Tennysons, to the un- 
speakable delight of the former, who were neverthe- 
less too shy or too delicate to approach the poet. 
Hawthorne's description of him in the Note Books 
is well known, and Mrs. Hawthorne wrote home a 
full and jubilant account of the occasion. Tennyson 
was satisfactorily picturesque, '' very handsome and 
careless looking, with a wide-awake hat, a black 
beard, round shoulders, and slouching gait ; most 
romantic, poetic, and interesting." His voice was 
deep and musical, and his hair was wild and stormy : 
''He is clearly the ' love of love and hate of hate,' 
and ' in a golden clime was born.' He is the Morte 
d'Arthur, In Memoriam, and Maud. He is Mariana 



114 zrcnn?6on- 

in the moated grange, he is the Lady Clara Vere de 
Vere, and rare, pale Margaret." 

Very likely he was all that to the outward view, 
but at that time he was leading a particularly straight- 
forward, unaffected life as an English gentleman, hap- 
pily married, with two fine boys. He had recently 
bought Farringford, whither he had come from 
Twickenham, where his first two years of married 
life were spent ; and the Memoir gives bright, delight- 
ful glimpses of father and sons playing battledore and 
shuttlecock in the fine grounds, going flower-hunting 
through the fields, blowing bubbles, brushing up 
leaves from the beautiful lawns, and making new 
glades through the shrubs. Unlike Browning, Ten- 
nyson had all the Paternal qualities. 

Mrs. Hawthorne's rapturous experience had a 
pretty sequel. She continues : 

''Again Mr. Hawthorne, Una, and I were at the 
Palace all day. We went up into the gallery of en- 
graving to listen to the music, and suddenly Una 
exclaimed, ' Mamma ! there is Tennyson ! ' He was 
sitting by the organ, listening to the orchestra. He 
had a child with him, a little boy in whose emotions 
and impressions he evidently had great interest, and 1 
presumed it was his son. I was soon convinced that 
1 saw also his wife and another little son, and all this 
proved true. It was charming to watch the group. 
Mrs. Tennyson had a sweet face, and the very sweetest 
smile I ever saw, and when she spoke to her husband 
or listened to him, her face showered a tender happy 



flDarriage anb Xaureateeblp, 115 

rain of light. She was graceful too, and gentle, but 
at the same time had a slightly peasant air. . . . 
The children were very pretty and picturesque, and 
Tennyson seemed to love them immensely. He 
devoted himself to them and was absorbed in their 
interest. Allingham, another English poet, told Mr. 
Hawthorne that his wife was an admirable one for 
him, — wise, tender, and of perfect temper, and she 
looks all this, and there is a kind of adoration in her 
expression when she addresses him. If he is moody 
and ill, I am sure she must be a blessed solace to him. " 
On the way out of the place, the younger son 
dallied behind with a nurse, while Tennyson and the 
others went on. Mrs. Hawthorne seized the oppor- 
tunity and the child, whom she kissed motherly, and 
''he smiled and seemed well pleased." She also was 
well pleased to have had in her arms Tennyson's child. 
It is rather amusing to find that Mrs. Browning 
doubted the perfect fitness of Mrs. Tennyson to her 
husband's needs. She would have had her more a 
critic, and less an acquiescent admirer ; in other 
words, more as Mrs. Browning herself was to her 
own remarkably self-reliant poet. The criticism need 
hardly be taken seriously since all that we know of 
Tennyson's home-life is shining testimony to its 
perfect harmony with his character as shown in his 
writings. His own words concerning his wife are 
these : '' The peace of God came into my life when 
1 married her,"* and they seem the exact expression 

' Hallam Tennyson's Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 



ii6 ZTenn^eoa 

ot the atmosphere in which he worked with un- 
wearied patience and unfailing skill for more than 
forty years after his union with the '' Dear, near, and 
true," of whom he rightly prophesied 

** No truer Time himseli 



Can prove you, though he make you evermore 
Dearer and nearer." 

On April 23, 1850, Wordsworth died at Rydal 
Mount, and in November of the same year the 
laurel passed to Tennyson, " greener," he said, " from 
the brows of him who uttered nothing base." The 
line of Laureates had hitherto not been crowded by 
distinguished poets. "Rare Ben Jonson"had dig- 
nified the office which properly began with him, 
Dryden was intellectually great, and Southey certainly 
gave to literature a few stanzas as lovely as the mass 
of his poetry was commonplace. But of the rest 
Colley Gibber is the only one remembered of the 
people, and his peculiar distinction rests upon his 
singular name and exhaustive vanity. Wordsworth 
himself had celebrated his brief term of office in an 
almost absolute silence. After his death the honour 
was proffered to Samuel Rogers who possessed two 
distinctions : he was the oldest poet then living, and 
in his youth he had run away from Dr. Johnson's 
door without knocking. Nothing in his career as a 
poet so became him as his declination of the offer on 
the ground of his great age and wealth. Leigh Hunt, 
also, was suggested, and it is said that he wanted the 
office. It probably did not occur to him that his 



flDarrlage anb Xaureateebip^ n; 

appointment would have been a singular example of 
royal impartiality, after his imprisonment some forty 
years before on account of a newspaper criticism 
made on the then prince-regent. Mrs. Browning was 
urged by the Athenceum as a suitable Laureate for the 
household of a female sovereign, and as a poet, further- 
more, whose claim was higher than that of any other 
living poet of either sex. Mrs. Browning's biog- 
rapher, Mr. Kenyon, remarks that ''the fact that in 
Robert Browning there was a poet of equal calibre 
with Tennyson though of so different a type, seems 
to have occurred to no one." 

It is easy now to recognise that Tennyson was 
Wordsworth's natural successor. Browning alone ri- 
valled him in the scope and excellence of his poetry, 
and Browning's genius was of a sort to prevent his 
being chosen as in any sense representative. His 
thoughts and emotions were not those that the ma- 
jority of the English people recognise as belonging to 
themselves and like to have expressed. Tennyson, 
on the other hand, was supremely if not com- 
prehensively national. There is a peculiar zest in the 
way his countrymen speak of ''Tennyson as an Eng- 
lishman." Neither Wordsworth nor Keats, Shelley 
nor Byron nor Coleridge, could have inspired quite 
that tone. Save Wordsworth any one of them might 
have belonged to some other land, and sung in some 
other language, and Wordsworth was too much aloof, 
too clear and simple and plain, as well as too majes- 
tic, to be identified with the desires and ideals of a 



ii8 irenn^eom 

multitude who never can be depended upon to 
worship the beauty of severity. But Tennyson had 
beautifully draped the sturdy form of the average and 
typical English thought. He had reproduced the 
familiar English landscape and the sacred English 
home, and already in The Princess had indicated his 
ability to make a ' ' picture-story. " In Memoriam had 
drawn deeper, and had given perfectly comprehensible 
expression to the great undercurrent of national faith 
above which played the waves of fluctuating doubt. 
There was nothing in all this to puzzle or to repel. If 
a curious word or simile caused a momentary interrup- 
tion of the thought, the reader went at the task of 
interpretation with a good heart, knowing the fund- 
amental idea to be well within his range. If there 
were excursions beyond the boundaries of the usual 
and the conventional, there was always the safe re- 
turn to the path the English mind has kept from 
generation to generation. In fact, though Tennyson 
was always noble in sentiment and frequently uplift- 
ing, he was never out of reach "upon a peak in 
Darien," and if this prevents our placing him with the 
great masters, it also accounts for his hold upon his 
own generation in his own country. 

As Laureate he produced no large amount of what 
may be called national verse ; but his official and 
patriotic poems are extremely characteristic, not so 
much of his literary style, which they often contra- 
dict, but of his quality ''as an Englishman." Sir 
Henry Taylor thought him ' ' too simple and childlike " 



flDarrlage anb Xaureateeblp* 119 

to see political questions on all sides ; but to the 
side of caution he was usually awake, with deep 
conviction and sympathy. It is interesting to find 
that the early poem beginning, ''You ask me why, 
tho' ill at ease," was little more than a poetical ver- 
sion of a speech of James Spedding on political 
''Unions" in the Cambridge Debating Club; but 
whether Spedding or another gave the suggestion, 
the view taken in the poem precisely fitted Tenny- 
son's mind. When he was called a Conservative, he 
replied that he would "conserve progress," which 
was an admirable definition of his mental attitude ; 
and he declined to be a candidate of either the 
Conservative or the Liberal party, when at differ- 
ent times each party wished to nominate him for the 
Rectorship of Glasgow University. Wherever in his 
poetry he gives adequate expression to the true dig- 
nity of his large view, he is, as we have said, suffi- 
ciently refreshing and inspiring. In some of his 
poems, however, he emphasises the conservation 
until the idea of progress is minimised, and he seems 
preoccupied with the conservative method in place 
of the progressive principle. This frequently gives 
to his patriotic poetry a temporal sound of politics 
and expediency which lays him open to Stopford 
Brooke's charge of unpoetical prudence. His poetical 
lapse seems, however, to be not in the side he takes, 
but in the difficulty with which he breathes the ample 
ether of abstract thought ; and in his reluctance to 
rise above the atmosphere of England, of Royalty and 



I20 ZTennpeon. 

Parliaments and temporary legislation, to the region 
of eternally governing law. 

The year of his appointment to the Laureateship 
was far from being one of literary dearth. Rossetti 
was contributing to the Germ ; Thackeray had just 
published Vanity Fair and Pendennis, and had Es- 
mond in train ; Carlyle was writing his brilliant Life 
of John Sterling; Landor, who had written, the year 
before, his exquisite quatrain, " 1 warmed both hands 
against the fire of life," was weeping over David 
Copper field; Macaulay was in the midst of his great- 
est and final task, and Browning printed Christmas 
Eve 2.^6. Easter Day, In America, Emerson had pub- 
lished Representative Men, in which he had said, 
most appropriately to Tennyson : '' A poet is no rat- 
tlebrain, saying what comes uppermost, and, be- 
cause he says everything, saying at last something 
good ; but a heart in unison with his time and coun- 
try." Lowell was writing the Nooning, feeling 
" very young for a man of thirty," and making up 
his mind to ''try more wholly after Beauty" in his 
poetry ; Longfellow was writing slowly on the Golden 
Legend; Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter appeared, and 
Whittier's Songs of Labour, with their humble and 
beautiful dedication. In France, Alfred de Musset, 
whom Taine and Swinburne were so intimately to 
associate with Tennyson, was writing Carmoisine, 
the final flicker of his adolescent genius ; Gautier was 
contributing art criticisms to La Presse ; Hugo, in 
exile, was preparing his Napoleon le petit, and George 




The Very Reverend Dr. Jowett 
{Master of Balliol, Oxford). 



From life. 



flDarriage anb XaureateeWp. 121 

Sand was translating and prefacing revolutionary 
works. Ibsen, in Norway, was publishing his first 
tragedy. Some of these were greater than Tenny- 
son, some were certainly less ; but none was more 
representative of the bland fusion of old thought with 
new thought, of ancient style with modern style, in 
one pellucid stream of genius. Besides the stimulus 
of so much activity among his fellow-writers, Tenny- 
son had opportunity to cull stirring and sufficiently 
poetic themes from the political events of the Tifties. 
In 185 1, he prefaced the seventh edition of his poems 
with an address to the Queen containing one stanza 
that has since been removed : 

** She brought a vast design to pass 

When Europe and the scattered ends 
Of our fierce world did meet as friends 
And brethren in her halls to class." 

This referred to the first Manchester Exhibition ; but 
in spite of that international effort, the friendly feeling 
among the various nations of the fierce world was 
not specially obvious just then. ''A military spirit 
was exhibiting itself every where not unlike that told 
of in Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth. The England 
of 1852 seems to threaten that ' ere this year expires 
we bear our civil swords and native fire as far as 
France.' At least the civil swords were sharpened 
in order that the country might be ready for a possi- 
ble and even an anticipated invasion from France."^ 
The " meddle and muddle policy " of the Liberal 

^ McCarthy's History of the Nineteenth Century. 



122 



l[;enn?0on» 



administration had justified the jibes of foreigners, the 
anti-Papal excitement following the Papal Bull ap- 
pointing Roman Catholic bishops throughout Eng- 
land had filled the newspapers with fervid articles. 
The people of England were hardly less agitated than 
the people of France over the coup d'etat, and the 
Duke of Wellington, who in English eyes was Eng- 
land's Washington, was dead. Disraeli and Glad- 
stone were facing one another over the meaty bone 
of the foreign policy. The country needed exhorta- 
tion and counsel, as any country always does, and 
Tennyson had the great examples of Milton and 
Wordsworth to inspire him. The fact that he could 
not rise to "their height in his national poems merely 
shows what all his poetry shows, that he was not 
born to be a leader, much less a reformer. The poems 
"Hands All Round," " Britons, Guard Your Own," 
and the ''Third of February, 1852," have fire enough ; 
but it is not the great still flame that burns in Words- 
worth's sonnet, ''September, 1802," or in his "Lon- 
don, 1802." A single stanza from "Britons, Guard 
Your Own " will serve to show the attitude toward 
Louis Napoleon : 

" Peace-lovers we, sweet Peace we all desire, 
Peace-lovers we, but who can trust a liar ? 
Peace-lovers, haters 
Of shameless traitors ; 

We hate not France, but this man's heart of stone : 
Britons, guard your own." 

The appeal to America in " Hands All Round " is char- 



flDarrlage a^^ Xaureatcsblp. 123 

acteristic of the feeling of its author, who wrote in 
1867 to Longfellow: ''We English and Americans 
should all be brothers as none other among the na- 
tions can be ; and some of us, come what may, will 
always be so, I trust." 

" Riflemen, Form," or, as it was first called, ''The 
War," was published in the Times of Monday, May 9, 
1859, bearing the signature of " T.," and therefore by 
some astutely credited to Mr. Tupper, and by others to 
Archbishop Trench. Twelve days before it appeared 
the Austfians had crossed the Ticino and six days af- 
ter its publication the French marched into Genoa. 
A writer in the Athenceum says : " The fourth line of 
the second stanza as then printed, 

* How should a despot set men free ? ' 

had a meaning, and a prophetic meaning, which is lost 
in the new version, 

* How can a despot feel with the Free ? ' " 

And he contrasts with Tennyson's lines : 

" Let your reforms for a moment go ! 

Look to your butts, and take good aims ! 
Better a rotten borough or so 
Than a rotten fleet and a city in flames ! " 

the following sentences from a contemporary letter 
of John Bright to the Rev. Newman Hall : 

" Surely," writes the Tribune of the People, " after 
spending twenty-eight millions a year in military 
services our population might be expected to be left 



124 ^enni?0on* 

at home in peace. The Volunteer movement is the 
most foolish of our time ; it is a hoax on the nation." 

Writing of the Volunteer movement of the early 
'fifties, Mr. McCarthy refers to this poem as follows : 

''The meaning of all this movement was ex- 
plained some years after by Mr. Tennyson, in a string 
of verses which did more honour perhaps to his 
patriotic feeling than to his poetic genius. The verses 
are absurdly unworthy of Tennyson as a poet ; but 
they express with unmistakable clearness the popu- 
lar sentiment of the hour ; the condition of uncert- 
ainty, vague alarm, and very general determination 
to be ready at all events for whatever might come. 
'Form, form, riflemen, form,' — wrote the Laureate; 
' better a rotten borough or two than a rotten fleet 
and a town in flames.' 'True that we have a faith- 
ful ally, but only the devil knows what he means.' 
This was the alarm and the explanation. We had a 
faithful ally, no doubt, but we certainly did not know 
what he meant. "^ 

The best-known patriotic poem of the first years 
of Tennyson's Laureateship is undoubtedly ''The 
Charge of the Light Brigade," which was printed in 
the Examiner of December 9, 1854, with the note, 
"Written after reading the first report of the Times 
correspondent where only 607 sabres are mentioned 
as having taken part in the charge. " It was reprinted 
later with another note : 

" Having heard that the brave soldiers at Sebasto- 

* McCarthy's History of the Nineteenth Century. 



flDarrlage anb Xaureateebip^ 125 

pol, whom I am proud to call my countrymen, have 
a liking for my ballad on the charge of the Light 
Brigade at Balaclava, 1 have ordered a thousand 
copies of it to be printed for them. No writing 
of mine can add to the glory they have acquired in 
the Crimea ; but if what I heard be true, they will 
not be displeased to receive these copies of the ballad 
from me, and to know that those who sit at home 
love and honour them. 

'* Alfred Tennyson. 

"8th August, 1855." 

Milnes said of this poem : '' A real gallop in verse 
and only good as such." It has, however, stirred 
some stout hearts. A writer in the Athenceum at the 
time of Tennyson's death referred to it with reminis- 
cent enthusiasm: ''Only the oldsters among us," 
he said, '' can pretend to remember the first appear- 
ance of ' The Charge of the Light Brigade ' (in the 
Examiner, December 9, 1854), and the commotion it 
made. At this distance we read quite calmly : 

* ** Forward the Light Brigade ! " 
Was there a man dismay'd } 
Not tho' the soldier knew 
Someone had blunder'd, — ' 

but in that winter of 1854 the Times correspondence 
from the Crimea made the air electrical and Tenny- 
son's charge drew sparks." He adds that the follow- 
ing lines, which in the Examiner preceded those 
quoted, and which have never been reprinted, reflect 



126 XTennpeon* 

even more vividly the local colour of the letters from 
the camp : 

** Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred, 
For up came an order which 

Someone had blunder'd. 
* Forward the Light Brigade ! 
Take the guns ! ' Nolan said. 
Into the valley of Death 

Rode the six hundred." 

The '' Ode on the Death of the Duke of Welling- 
ton " is pretty generally recognised by English critics 
as the finest of Tennyson's Laureate poems. The 
German critics, for some inconceivable reason, have 
found it pompous and prosaic. It was this ode that 
made the tears stream from Jowett's eyes when Ten- 
nyson read it in his presence ; and discounting the 
natural emotion that the subject would cause, there 
is reason enough for that sort of tears in the mourn- 
ful power of the long poem that ends in a strain so 
lofty as to seem almost unimpeachable in mood and 
music : 

** He is gone who seem'd so great. — 
Gone ; but nothing can bereave him 
Of the force he made his own 
Being here, and we believe him 
Something far advanced in State, 
And that he wears a truer crown 
Than any wreath that man can weave him. 
Speak no more of his renown, 
Lay your earthly fancies down. 
And in the vast cathedral leave him, 
God accept him, Christ receive him." 



flDarrlage anb laureatesbip. 127 

Poems of this order, elegiac and sympathetic, were 
much better suited to Tennyson's feeling and phi- 
losophy than poems of more violent occasion. In 
cases where rebuke seemed to him necessary he was 
particularly unfortunate, the ''Third ot February, 
1852," being the only successful example. Much of 
the verse he produced under stress of circumstance 
showed a discomposure so marked as almost to sug- 
gest deshabille and touch the ludicrous. Mr. Swin- 
burne declares: ''With all due admiration for the 
genuine patriotism of his ' Ballad of the Fleet ' and 
'Defence of Lucknow,' I must be permitted to ob- 
serve that his general tone of thought and utterance 
on large questions of contemporary national history 
is such as might with admirable propriety find such 
expression as it finds at the close of The Princess 
from the lips not even of ' the Tory member' but of 
the Tory member's undergraduate son — supposing 
that young gentleman to be other for the nonce than 
a socialist. There is a strain, so to speak, as of 
beardless bluster about it, which could by no pos- 
sible ingenuity have been so rendered as to suggest 
a more appropriate mouthpiece. It has the shrill 
unmistakable accent, not of a provincial deputy, but 
of a provincial schoolboy."^ One does not expect 
moderation from Mr. Swinburne, and it may certainly 
be said that he has overstated the case. In the pas- 
sage from which the above quotation is taken he ex- 
cepts from his condemnation the sonnets on Poland 

' Swinburne's Miscellanies. 



128 ?i;enn?0on^ 

and Montenegro, '' Hands All Round," and " Britons, 
Guard Your Own." If we add to these the '' Defence 
of Lucknow " and the " Ballad of the Fleet," we have 
so large a proportion of Tennyson's political utterance 
as to make a judgment of his quality based upon the 
remainder quite one-sided. Mr. Swinburne's real 
quarrel with him seems to be on the subject of his 
attitude toward France. 

" In a sonnet addressed to Victor Hugo," he says, 
'' Lord Tennyson, with rather singular and rather more 
than questionable taste, informed the master poet of 
his age that he was said not to love England. No 
doubt, as I have elsewhere found occasion to remark, 
he did not love England as he loved his mother 
France, and his foster-mother Spain ; and against 
certain phases of modern English policy as against 
certain shades of modern English character, Hugo did 
undoubtedly think fit once and again to utter a frank 
and friendly word of protest. But such a tone as 
Lord Tennyson's almost invariable tone towards 
France is simply inconceivable as coming from Victor 
Hugo with reference to any great nation in the world. 
Now this sort of strident anti-Gallican cackle was all 
very well, if even then it was not very wise, in the 
days of Nelson. But in our piping times of peace it 
is purely ludicrous to hear a martial shepherd of 
idyllic habits thus chirping defiance and fluting dis- 
paragement of the world beyond his sheep-cote." 

Yet the sonnet on Victor Hugo ends suavely 
enough : 



:^( fiv^c/7^ ^Z_/ P6lZ^ 








Letter from Tennysofi to the Publishers 
of " 77/^ Westinifister Review. " 

Reproduction in/ac-simile. 



flDarrlaQe an& Xaurcateebip* 129 



-England, France, all man to be 



Will make one people ere man's race be run : 
And I, desiring that diviner day. 
Yield thee full thanks for thy full courtesy 
To younger England in the boy my son." 

But the impeachment is not to be evaded, however 
much its form is to be deprecated. There is un- 
doubtedly a note of insularity in Tennyson's work. 
He held rightly enough that ''that man's the best 
Cosmopolite who loves his native country best," but 
as a matter of fact he was no Cosmopolite at all. 
What he disliked he dubbed ''foreign" ; war, of which 
Britain had certainly known her share, was "this 
French God, the Child of Hell, " and art ' ' with poison- 
ous honey" was "stol'n from France." In the fine 
"Third of February, 1852/' which Herr Engels has 
called a "bold achievement" (eine klihne Tat) for a 
Poet Laureate, the German critic is obliged to place 
the exclamatory mark against the line, 

** No little German state are we," 

and naturally finds the verse arrogant and purely 
English, although at the time of its writing some of 
the German states were certainly little enough to 
justify the phrase. 

On the other hand Tennyson was warmly in 
sympathy with the cause of freedom in Italy, and 
" England and America in 1782 " showed the breadth 
of his sympathies when it was a question of English- 
man versus Englishman. 



I30 ZTennijaon. 

" O thou, that sendest out the man 

To rule by land and sea, 
Strong mother of a Lion-line, 
Be proud of those strong sons of thine 

Who wrench'd their rights from thee ! " 

If we examine his dedications and odes and ad- 
dresses on national occasions we find their strongest 
characteristic an almost touching admiration of Eng- 
land and Englishmen. He is never so happy as when 
he is praising national worth, his infelicity is never so 
apparent as when he is arraigning England for her 
failings. He is on the side of the patriotism that de- 
demands justice and liberty ''in the name of the 
Queen." As Dr. Van Dyke has suggested, we can- 
not imagine him on the Stuart side in 1642, and his 
good fortune lay in the essential integrity and wis- 
dom of the class toward which his taste directed 
him. He was seldom moved by the impulse that 
moved Wordsworth in the sonnet beginning, 

" England! the time is come when thou should'st wean 
Thy heart from its emasculating food," 

although instances of specific weakness and injustice 
roused his indignation, no matter in what class he 
found them. He saw that in the main the progress 
of his country was toward wider freedom and fuller 
light, and he was very well content to look far ahead 
for perfection or the nearest human approach to it, 
without insisting upon sudden and revolutionary 
moves. His appreciation of an honest, if imperfect, 
obedience to motives on the whole excellent and 



fIDarrlaee an& Xaureateeblp* 131 

just, endeared him to the people of England who were 
trying for the right with conservative methods. One 
fears they could not so much have loved a soul that 
was 'Mike a Star and dwelt apart " and discerned and 
rebuked all selfishness and error. They certainly did 
not so much love Milton. No one has better ex- 
pressed the limitation in Tennyson's patriotism than 
Professor Dowden in a single passage of his compari- 
son of Tennyson with Browning : 

'' Without reverence for duty, of which freedom 
is the essential condition, there is no true love of 
freedom. That is Mr. Tennyson's part of the truth. 
But passion for a righteous cause may create new 
forms of duty, and give the adequate power to fulfil 
them ; and if it does not, the failure is itself a suc- 
cess which God, who can give the morning star, will 
approve. That is Mr. Browning's part." 





CHAPTER VII. 
FARRINGFORD. 

TENNYSON'S home at Farringford was of those 
that lend themselves readily to enthusiastic 
description. In spite of all that has been 
said of its seclusion, we know it through a hundred 
pens, and none has depicted it more happily than 
Mrs. Ritchie's. She takes us back to the life of the 
place "when the houses were few and the present 
generation very young," and shows us ''a green and 
sunshiny little republic," with Tennyson presiding, 
and everyone going his own way and following his 
own bent.^ " I can hardly imagine Eden itself," she 
says, "a sweeter garden, more sunny and serene 
than Farringford. From Eden, as we know, there 
was no sight of the sea, but from Farringford, all day 
long and by moonlit nights, you may watch the dis- 
tant waters, beating time to the natural life in the 
green glades round the Poet's house." She goes on 
to quote from Henry Cameron's reminiscences of 
*' the garden, ' careless ordered, ' and its beds of tur- 



' Lord Tennyson and His Friends. 
132 



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jrarrinQforl)* 133 

quoise forget-me-not ; of the wood-pigeons, and the 
blackbirds and their notes ; of the great ilex tree and 
the solemn cedar in the front of the house. 

'' Beyond the house lies the kitchen-garden, sun- 
ning itself in fragrance, with its straight beds full of 
lavender and bright flowers, and the big rosemary 
bush at the far end, and the old walls standing 
bravely under their load of green. Tennyson's old 
shepherd used to say that of early summer mornings, 
about four o'clock, when he went out to look after 
his flock, ' the birds all round the house would be 
singing like a charm.' How often have we listened 
to them ! Yellow-hammers, tom-tits, blackbirds in 
chorus, with the thrushes and the cuckoo's notes 
striking into the sweet babel. Of an evening the 
rooks would join in with priestly whirls and flights in 
the high sunsets. Besides all this there were the 
people living in the cottages all round about ; even 
the dependents and the humbler dwellers in this little 
island promontory caught something of the light from 
the mountain, and used to seem more interesting 
than other people in other places. Lord Tennyson's 
old shepherd was like some character out of the 
Bible — simple, pious, assiduous, living among his 
flocks and tending them to the last. There was the 
good old fisherman down by the beach, there were 
the children who used to come down from the fort 
with flowers and who planted Mrs. Cameron's banks 
with primrose roots." 

From the same source comes an endearing picture 



134 zrenn)?0on^ 

of the Tennyson family as they appeared among 
these fair surroundings : 

''The beloved Lady Tennyson in her long chair 
carriage, pushed gently across the lawn by her boys, 
and the Poet moving on with his peculiar, slow step, 
perhaps with a spade in his hand, and a young tree 
which he was about to transplant. How can his 
splendid personality be described ? " 

The house itself is faintly sketched in Mrs. 
Ritchie's Records ; it seemed to her '' like a charmed 
palace with green walls without and speaking walls 
within. There hung Dante with his solemn nose and 
wreath ; Italy gleamed over the doorways ; friends' 
faces lined the passages, books filled the shelves, 
and a glow of crimson was everywhere ; the oriel 
drawing-room window was full of green and golden 
leaves, of the sound of birds, and of the distant sea." 
Phillips Brooks, who visited a Farringford, speaks 
of a pleasant habit in the family of leaving the table 
at dinner just before the coffee and fruit, and having 
that part of the meal served on a fresh table by the 
windows, where they could watch the lovely view. 

The vision evoked by these fragments of descrip- 
tion differs very much from the pictures we keep in 
mind of the American homes of American poets: from 
the Craigie House at Cambridge, standing back from 
Brattle Street among the lilac bushes ; from Elm- 
wood, looking out upon the fields and the ''long 
curve of the Charles " and the marshes beyond; and 
from the plain Concord house with the little garden in 



jfarrlngforb* 135 

which the corn was '' sure to come up tulips " ; and 
the difference is much the same as that between the 
American poetry and Tennyson's, the first a little 
bare and plain and stiff, and yet with its own crisp 
charm, the second so draped and furnished and 
flexible and rambling. 

Bayard Taylor was at Farringford in 1857 and 
wrote with enthusiasm : 

"The drive across the heart of the island, from 
Newport to Freshwater, was alone worth the journey 
from London. The softly undulating hills, the deep 
green valleys, the blue waters of the Solent, and the 
purple glimpses of the New Forest beyond formed a 
fit vestibule of landscape through which to approach 
a poet's home. 

''As we drew near Freshwater my coachman 
pointed out Farringford — a cheerful grey country man- 
sion, with a small, thick-grassed park before it, a grove 
behind, and, beyond all, the steep shoulder of the 
chalk downs, a gap in which, at Freshwater, showed 
the dark-blue horizon of the Channel. Leaving my 
luggage at one of the two little inns, 1 walked to the 
house, with the lines from Maud chiming in my 
mind. ' The dry-tongued laurel ' shone glossily in 
the sun, the cedar ' sighed for Lebanon ' on the lawn, 
and 'the liquid azure bloom of a crescent of sea,' 
glimmered afar. 

" I had not been two minutes in the drawing-room 
before Tennyson walked in. So unlike are the pub- 
lished portraits of him that I was almost in doubt as 



136 Tlenn^eon^ 

to his identity/ The engraved head suggests a mod- 
erate stature, but he is tall and broad-shouldered as a 
son of Anak, with hair, beard, and eyes of southern 
darkness. Something in the lofty brow and aquiline 
nose suggests Dante, but such a deep, mellow chest 
voice never could have come from Italian lungs. 

" He proposed a walk as the day was wonderfully 
clear and beautiful. We climbed the steep comb of 
the chalk cliff, and slowly wandered westward until 
we reached the Needles, at the extremity of the island 
and some three or four miles distant from his resi- 
dence. During the conversation with which we be- 
guiled the way, I was struck with the variety of his 
knowledge. Not a little flower on the downs which 
the sheep had spared, escaped his notice, and the 
geology of the coast, both terrestrial and submarine, 
was perfectly familiar to him. I thought of a remark 
which I had once heard from the lips of a distin- 
guished English author, that Tennyson was the wis- 
est man he ever knew, and could well believe that he 
was sincere in making it. 1 shall respect the sanctity 
of the delightful family circle to whicji 1 was admitted 
and from which I parted the next afternoon with true 
regret. Suffice it to say that the poet is not only fort- 
unate and happy in his family relations ; but that 
with his large and liberal nature, his sympathies with 
what is true and noble in humanity, and his depth 
and tenderness of feeling, he deserves to be so." 

' This refers to 1857, when only Laurence's portrait and Woolner's medallion 
had appeared. 



]farrin9for5^ 137 

Professor Church, in The Laureate's Country, has 
given a very careful account of the history and situa- 
tion of Farringford, a portion of w^hich may be of 
service to American travellers. 

" Freshwater, to use the name w^ithout qualifica- 
tion," he says, " is an extensive parish occupying the 
south-western corner of the Isle of Wight. It is di- 
vided into the five hamlets of Easton, Weston, Nor- 
ton, Totland Bay, and School Green, extends over 
more than five thousand acres, and contains between 
two and three thousand inhabitants. Freshwater 
Gate is, properly speaking, a natural cave in the cliff, 
but the name is sometimes used of the opening in the 
line of downs that- form the south-western coast of 
the island, an opening that may be otherwise de- 
scribed as Freshwater Bay. The ' fresh water ' from 
which it gets its name, probably given by seafarers 
eastward bound who found here their first oppor- 
tunity of replenishing their empty barrels, is to be 
found not many yards from the beach, in the springs 
of the Yar, a little stream which soon opens out into 
a wide estuary, and so flows into the channel of the 
Solent at the ancient little town of Yarmouth. 

''The Gate or Bay is a picturesque little stretch of 
beach not more than a few hundred yards in length. 
At its eastern point are some curious detached masses 
of chalk cliff, which stand out in the sea, some five 
hundred yards from the shore at high water, one of 
them hollowed by the action of the water into the 
shape of an arch. Beyond these, as the traveller 



138 ?renn?6on* 

pushes his way eastward, the down continues to as- 
cend, though not without interruption, till it reaches, 
in St. Catherine's Hill, the highest point of the island, 
an altitude of more than eight hundred feet above 
the sea-level. Westward of the Bay there is a some- 
what steep ascent, which leads to one of the many 
forts which guard the approaches to the Channel." 
Mrs. Browning regarded the building of this fort, 
which Tennyson much disliked, as '' a piece of pure 
poetical justice" toward him for having written 
'^Riflemen, Form!" 

Professor Church continues: ''Beyond the fort 
the traveller comes upon a fine stretch of open down, 
now called Tennyson's Down. Its seaward bound- 
ary is a range of lofty cliffs, sometimes showing a 
sheer fall into the water, sometimes sufficiently in- 
clined to allow of a somewhat perilous descent into 
one of the little shingly bays which have been hol- 
lowed out by the waves. At the western extremity 
of the island they have been broken by the storms of 
centuries into those strangely shaped rocks which 
are known as The Needles, a name associated with 
many a tragic story of shipwreck. Above The 
Needles is the lighthouse, standing on the highest 
point of the downs, and not less than six hundred 
feet above the sea. The Needles passed, our faces be- 
ing now turned from northward to eastward, we come 
first to Alum Bay, with its sand cliffs so picturesquely 
diversified in colour, then to Totland Bay, and so to 
the cliffs' end, when nearly opposite the formidable 



farrlngforb* 139 

bastions of Hurst Castle on the mainland. The do- 
main of Farringford can be seen on the traveller's 
right hand as he makes his way westward from 
Freshwater Bay, lying at the foot of the inland slope 
of the down. The house itself is not visible from 
any point of this route, but a glimpse of the roof may 
be caught from the ascent on the eastern side of the 
bay. The estate extends to between four and five 
hundred acres, part of them downland, and contains 
what is known as King's Manor. The royal owner- 
ship indicated by this name is recorded by Domes- 
day Book, where we find the following entry : ' Ye 
King holds Frescewatre in demesne. It was held by 
Tosti [Earl Tostig, brother of King Harold — this, of 
course, refers to ' the time of King Edward,' a stand- 
ard of comparison used throughout the Survey], and 
was then assessed at 15 hides. It is now assessed 
at 6 hides. There are fifteen ploughlands, two plough- 
lands are in demesne, and 18 villagers and 10 border- 
ers employ 8 ploughs. There are seven servants and 
six acres of meadow. It was worth in King Ed- 
ward's time sixteen pounds, and afterwards twenty 
pounds, but it is let at thirty pounds.' At this time, 
therefore, all Freshwater was what we should call 
Crown land. But it would appear that part of it was 
afterwards bestowed on some ecclesiastical body. 
This body seems to have been the Abbey of Quarr 
or Quarrera [so called from the stone quarries in the 
neighbourhood]. Quarr was near the town of Ryde, 
and was one of the first Cistercian monasteries estab- 



I40 ^enn^eom 

lished in England. Its first foundation was due to 
Baldwin, Earl of Devon, who endowed it in the 
thirty-second year of Henry I. Subsequent benefact- 
ors added to its revenues, and at the dissolution, its 
income was estimated at a net sum of ^134 3s. i id. 
Some of the local names recall this ecclesiastical 
ownership. Among them are ' Maiden's Croft ' 
['Virgin Mary's Field'], 'Abraham's Mead,' and 
^The Clerk's Hill.'" 

Tennyson has himself described the Farringford 
surroundings in various passages of his later poems, 
and most specifically in the invitation to Maurice, 
who had stood godfather to Hallam. Maurice, it will 
be remembered, was deprived of his professorships 
at King's College on account of his Theological Es- 
says, in which his inherent breadth of beliei mani- 
fested itself too boldly for the time and place. He 
had dedicated the second edition of his book to Ten- 
nyson in this touching letter, which reveals, among 
other things, the character of Tennyson's influence 
upon students of religion, and the confidence this 
particular student felt in his sympathy with broad 
human interpretations of theological doctrines : 

"To Alfred Tennyson, Esa., Poet Laureate. 
''My dear Sir : 

"I have mentioned in these Essays that a the- 
ology which does not correspond to the deepest 
thoughts and feelings of human beings cannot be a 
true theology. Your writings have taught me to 



3farrtnQfor&» 141 

enter into many of those thoughts and feelings. 
Will you forgive me the presumption of offering you 
a book which at least acknowledges them and does 
them homage ? 

''As the hopes which I have expressed in this 
volume are more likely to be fulfilled to our children 
than to ourselves, 1 might perhaps ask you to accept 
it as a present to one of your name, in whom you 
have given me a very sacred interest. Many years, 
1 trust, will elapse before he knows that there are 
any controversies in the world into which he has 
entered. Would to God that in a few more he may 
find that they have ceased ! At all events, if he 
should ever look into these Essays they may tell 
him what meaning some of the former generation 
attached to words which will be familiar and dear 
to his generation, and to those that follow his, — how 
there were some who longed that the bells of our 
churches might indeed 

' Ring out the darkness of the land, 
Ring in the Christ that is to be ! ' 

*' Believe me, my dear sir, 

'' Yours very truly and gratefully, 

"F. D. Maurice.'* 

Tennyson spoke at once with no uncertain sound: 

'' Should all our churchmen foam in spite 
At you, so careful of the right, 

Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome 
(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight ; 



142 Zcnmeon. 

** Where, far from noise and smoke of town, 
I watch the twilight falling brown 

All round a careless-order'd garden, 
Close to the ridge ol a noble down. 

** You '11 have no scandal while you dine, 
But honest talk and wholesome wine. 

And only hear the magpie gossip 
Garrulous under a roof of pine ; 

'* For groves of pine on either hand, 
To break the blast of winter stand ; 

And further on, the hoary Channel 
Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand." 

In his life at Farringford, Tennyson seems to have 
been uniformly simple and generous. Many people 
visited him there, — men of science, painters, writers, 
and statesmen : Professor Tyndall, Professor Jebb, 
Jowett, Woolner, Millais, Longfellow, Sir John Sim- 
eon, Dean Bradley, and Garibaldi to plant the famous 
little tree. There is a story of the Prince of Wales 
calling upon him and finding him absent, and over- 
awing the maid with the simple remark, ''Say the 
Prince of Wales called" ; and there are other stories 
involving high personages and clever talkers, so that 
one gains a general impression of ''good company " 
at Farringford ; but the more charming and revealing 
anecdotes are those that show the childlike nature 
of the great, rugged " Son of Anak," who went about, 
as a little boy said of him, "making poets for the 
Queen under the stars." He seems not always to 
have been amiable, and somewhat to have cherished 
the picturesque gloom so fascinating to his younger 



farringfort), 143 

admirers. Sir Henry Taylor wrote that he came to 
call one morning ''in an agreeable mood though it 
was in the morning. His agreeable moods are gen- 
erally in the evening." And he added a comment 
on his independence of wind and weather: "Mrs. 
Cameron says that in one of the great storms of this 
year he walked all along the coast to The Needles, 
which is six miles off. With all his shattered nerves 
and uneasy gloom, he seems to have some sorts of 
strength and hardihood. There is a great deal in 

him that is like . But his tenderness is more 

genuine, as well as his simplicity ; and he has no 
hostilities, and is never active as against people. He 
only grumbles." 

Mrs. Taylor wrote of going to see the Tennysons, 
and of being invited up to the poet's attic rooms : 

''When 1 had said all I had to say about the 
beauty of his views (not quite enough to satisfy him, 
though, for I liked one view — his own — much the 
best, and he growled out, ' How very odd you are ! 
One view is just as fine as the other.'), he took me 
all over his place, which is really very lovely, and he 
was very kind and cordial, though full of complaints 
of the wickedness of the islanders, who look at him 
and pick his cowslips ; cordial to the girls, too, 
though he heard me encourage them to fill their 
basket from his woods." 

A pleasanter glimpse of him is gained from an ac- 
count in the Spectator of his visit to an old lady living 
near Grasmere, where he seems to have been an ideal 



144 Ztenni^eon. 

guest : '' At the old-fashioned family dinner he was 
interested by the four generations about the long 
table, noticing especially one little boy of three : 
' There is a glory about that child ' ; and the homely 
fare seemed to please him greatly, his face quite 
lighting up at the sight of a dish of beans and bacon, 
the like of which he had not seen of late, and wished 
he saw oftener. On taking leave he said, ' I 've had 
a very jolly day,' and altogether the union of enthus- 
iasm and simplicity struck us as another instance of 
what we had long known in Wordsworth." 

Edith Nicholl, in St. Nicholas, gives an attract- 
ive sketch of him as he appeared to a little girl who 
was ''thwee" the day that he was forty-five, and 
who was celebrating her birthday on top of a hay- 
stack when he came to call. In the Memoir are 
anecdotes in any number, amusing and tender, illus- 
trating his genuineness and want of elaboration, 
qualities that seem not to belong to the author of 
the poems, but that certainly belonged to the man. 
People have grown to think of him as holding him- 
self aloof and surrounding himself with visions of the 
Round Table ; but, in reality, he was very eager over 
the present day and the living person, it is one of 
the paradoxes of truth that he should have been so 
fond of the luxury of cultivated existence, and so 
natural and plain and almost Bohemian, it would 
seem, in himself. It delights one's fancy, for balance 
to find him rejoicing in a diet of corned beef and po- 
tatoes, and teasing Mrs. Cameron by meddling with 




1 

C 



I 

Si 



farrlngfor^ 145 

her poisonous toys. In his personal appearance he 
was noticeably careless — "no dandy," as Emerson 
truly said. When the University of Oxford, in 1855, 
conferred upon him the degree of D.C.L., and he 
came in sight in his robes with his customary air of 
negligence, the gallery testified its appreciation of 
his somewhat dishevelled look by the tender inquiry: 
''Did your mother wake and call you early, Alfred 
dear ? " But ridicule was not the only emotion called 
forth by the tall figure, so obviously out of place in 
the ceremonious atmosphere : 

'' We ourselves," wrote Mr. Gladstone, editorially, 
'' with some thousands of other spectators, saw him 
receive, in that noble structure of Wren, the theatre 
of Oxford, the decoration of D.C.L, which we per- 
ceive he always wears on his title-page. Among his 
colleagues in the honour were Sir De Lacy Evans 
and Sir John Burgoyne, fresh from the stirring ex- 
ploits of the Crimea ; but even patriotism, at the 
fever heat of war, could not command a more fervent 
enthusiasm for the old and gallant soldiers than was 
evoked by the presence of Mr. Tennyson."' 

One of the most interesting features of the Fresh- 
water neighbourhood appears to have been the Cam- 
eron home, which stood half-way between Farringford 
and the sea. Mr. Cameron was ''a Benthamite 
jurist and philosopher of great learning and ability." 
His wife was the daughter of an Indian civil servant 
high in office. When they came from India to the 

' Gladstone's Gleanings of Past Years. 



146 zrenn?6on. 

Isle of Wight they established there a carnival of 
harmless eccentricity, beside which Tennyson's mild 
vagaries must have seemed the stiffest conventional- 
ity. Zeal was the key-note of Mrs. Cameron's char- 
acter and her ardour in friendship was sometimies 
rather appalling. '' Does Alice ever tell you," wrote 
Sir Henry Taylor, ''or do I, of how we go on with 
Mrs. Cameron, whom you saw the beginning of at 
Tunbridge Wells ? how she keeps showering upon 
us her ' barbaric pearls and gold ' — India shawls, 
turquoise bracelets, inlaid portfolios, ivory elephants, 
etc., — and how she writes us letters of six sheets long 
all about ourselves, thinking that we can never be 
sufficiently sensible of the magnitude and enormity 
of our virtue ? And, for our part, I think that we do 
not find flattery, at least this kind (for hers is sin- 
cere), to be so disagreeable as people say it is ; and 
we like her and grow fond of her." In pursuing this 
particular affection the lady employed unique meth- 
ods : "The transference of her personal effects is 
going on day after day," continued Sir Henry, " and 
I think that shortly Cameron will find himself left 
with nothing but his real property." One of the 
gifts was an Indian shawl of much value which was 
accepted at the point of the sword by Mrs. Taylor, 
and afterwards returned. After a time Mrs. Taylor 
had occasion to visit a hospital at Putney, and found 
there '' a very expensive piece of mechanism in the 
form of a sofa " inscribed with her own name. Mrs. 
Cameron had sold the shawl and had thus used the 



JarrlnQfor^ 147 

proceeds. The result of all this startling fervour was 
at last satisfactory, and in 1850 Sir Henry described 
the final yielding : 

" The Camerons have grown to be a great deal to 
us in our daily life — more than one would have 
thought possible in the course of a year's intercourse 
arising out of an accidental meeting. Mrs. Cameron 
has driven herself home to us by a power of loving 
which I have never seen exceeded, and an equal de- 
termination to be beloved. On meeting with some 
difficulty last winter she told Alice that before the 
year was over she would love her like a sister. She 
pursued her object through many trials, wholly re- 
gardless of the world's ways, putting pride out of the 
question ; and what she said has come to pass, and 
more ; we all love her, Alice, I, Aubrey de Vere, Lady 
Monteagle — and even Lord Monteagle, who likes 
eccentricity in no other form, likes her." 

The house at Freshwater had been bought on a 
sudden impulse from an old sailor who sold two 
houses to his impetuous customers ; and the place 
was called Dimbola, after a Ceylon estate belonging 
to the Camerons. Here Mrs. Cameron began her fa- 
mous photographing, turning her coal-house into her 
dark room, and her fowl-house into her studio, the 
society of hens and chickens being ** soon changed 
into that of prophets, painters, and lovely maidens." 
She is reported as saying of the persons she invited 
to sit for her that she only took " the young, the fair, 
and the famous," and she seems very nearly if not 



148 ^enn^eoih 

entirely to have made her words good. Remarkable 
men and women, the notables of the century, lent 
themselves to her bewitchery, and she succeeded in 
working them up to a state approaching her own en- 
thusiasm. Mrs. Ritchie remembers a procession of 
young men, carrying foot-pans full of photographs 
by moonlight across the garden : ' ' They were strange 
young men from Oxford who had only called by 
chance, and for the first time ; they are now grave 
and reverend signors, making speeches in Parliament, 
directing fleets, armies, and elections ; also never 
were pans of photographs more carefully carried by 
moonlight." 

The entire family were original and unconventional 
in their ways : Mrs. Cameron and her sisters designed 
their own gowns, for one thing, and to see one of 
them "float into a room with sweeping robes and 
falling folds was almost an event in itself, and not to 
be forgotten." Whatever their hands found to do 
they did it with their might, and the Laodicean of- 
fence was unknown to them. Mrs. Ritchie tells the 
story of one of Sir Henry Taylor's visits to Dimbola 
after an illness. An eastern room was ready for him, 
and of course it missed the afternoon sunlight. Mrs. 
Cameron went into it the day before he arrived, de- 
cided that another window was necessary to his 
comfort, and when the hour of arrival came the win- 
dow was ready, with the afternoon sun glinting 
through the white muslin curtain which had been 
hung just as the carriage drove up. It is not surpris- 



]farrtnafor&* 149 

ing that Sir Henry felt himself at home in so hos- 
pitable an atmosphere, and described the manner of 
life among the Camerons with zest. The house, 
he said, was one to which '' everybody resorted at 
pleasure, and in which no man, woman, or child was 
ever known to be unwelcome. 

" Conventionalities had no place in it ; and though 
Cameron was more of a scholar and philosopher than 
a country gentleman, the house might easily have 
been mistaken for that of the old English squire 
who is said to have received his guests with the an- 
nouncement, kind though imperious, ' This is Liberty 
Hall, and if everybody does not do as he likes here, 
by God I '11 make him ! ' 

''One day, I remember, a lady and gentleman 
and their daughter came to luncheon, and Mrs. 
Cameron, wishing to introduce them to me, took the 
liberty of asking them what were their names. She 
had met them in the steamboat when crossing from 
Lymington to Yarmouth the day before, and had in- 
vited them without knowing anything about them. 
Another day she met a tourist on the cliffs without a 
hat ; and being asked what had become of it, he said 
it had been blown into the sea. Whereupon she told 
him he must not go about with no hat to his head, 
and he must call at her house and she would find him 
one. The attractions of the house, as well as the easy 
access to it, soon became known far and wide, and it 
swarmed with guests. Cameron himself, agreeable 
as he was in society and much more than agreeable, 



I50 ^enni20on. 

was not particularly fond of it. Nevertheless, he 
seemed quite content that the house should be al- 
ways full, and when he preferred seclusion he went 
to bed." 

Mr. O'Connor, in his Century article, speaks of the 
friendship between Mr. Cameron and Tennyson, and 
also of the bright daring of Mrs. Cameron's intercourse 
with the poet. He tells the story of her bringing 
some strangers who had been denied admission to 
the Tennyson house, boldly into his presence with 
the remark, "Alfred, these are strangers from over- 
seas come to see a lion, and behold ! a bear." 

Many of the illustrations for this book are repro- 
ductions of Mrs. Cameron's photographs, and Tenny- 
son's portraits are not the least successful. After Mr. 
Fields, the publisher, had visited Farringford she sent 
him some prints with this characteristic message : 

''Mr. and Mrs. Tennyson have spoken with 
pleasure of your visit, and I can entirely understand 
the eternal delight it is to you to have dwelt with 
them in their dear home. Only in this way can one 
fully estimate either his or her most beautiful and 
endearing qualities. His immortal powers, of course, 
are conveyed in his books, but very few come to a 
perfect and real appreciation of him, who have not 
seen him in the intimacy of private life. . . . You 
will see how perfect and valuable these impressions 
are, and I delight in making a gift of them to those 
whom I know to be so worthy of the gift as you are." 



CHAPTER VIII. 

**MAUD" AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE ILLUS- 
TRATIONS. 

AS a mere matter of chance, it is odd that a 
study of insanity should have been the first 
fruit of calm Farringford. Maud was con- 
ceived in the lovely garden when the outer world 
was full of war, and the spirit of the garden and 
the spirit of the outer world each entered into the 
poem. It is another story in verse, violent and 
morbid, where The Princess is joyous and whole- 
some. Madness has a certain stimulating attraction 
for poets, and Tennyson, though of balanced mind 
and sane, was not exempt. He chose to speak in 
the person of his hero, who, like Shelley's maniac, 
seems hurt 

** Even as a man with his peculiar wrong 
To hear but of the oppression of the strong." 

A young man, with the taint in his blood, the hero lives 
alone in a little village, brooding over the suspected 
villainy that drove his father to ruin and suicide. 
Already he is "a nerve o'er which do creep the else- 

151 



152 zrennijaon* 

unfelt oppressions of this earth, "^ and asks with im- 
patience : 

**Why do they prate of the blessings of Peace? we have made 
them a curse, 
Pickpockets, each hand lusting lor all that is not its own ; 
And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse 
Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own 
hearthstone ? " 

Maud then dawns like a cool May morning on the 
scene, and although most of all he would ''flee 
from the cruel madness of love," he first endures and 
then embraces the charming vision, and his ecstasy 
of pessimism changes to an ecstasy of 'adoration. His 
love is returned, and the lovers meet in the street, 
by the church, in the garden, and among the shining 
fields. Unfortunately Maud has a brother, whom the 
hero felicitously describes as ''that dandy-despot," 



who, 



** That jewell'd mass of millinery, 
That oil'd and curl'd Assyrian Bull 
Smelling of musk and of insolence," 

'* Leisurely tapping a glossy boot 
And curving a contumelious lip," 



gorgonises the lover from head to foot 

*' With a stony British stare." 

The situation is complicated by the fact that Maud's 
father is the man whom the hero suspects of bad 
faith toward his own father ; and in the brother he 
sees the old man's qualities repeated, while 

* SheWey's Julian and Maddalo. 



''flDaub/' 153 

*' Maud to him is nothing akin : 
Some peculiar mystic grace 
Made her only the child of her mother, 
And heap'd the whole inherited sin 
On that huge scapegoat of the race, 
All, all upon the brother." 

A quarrel arises between the ''huge scapegoat" 
and the hero, then a duel, and the brother falls. Then, 
pure grovelling madness, incarceration, and finally 
the singular cruelty of recovery after Maud is dead, 
an awakening to higher aims and the better mind. 

Looking at the plot alone, the impression of melo- 
drama is decided, but so might it be with Hamlet, 
and Tennyson has called his Maud ''a little Ham- 
let.'' The real test of the poem is the power it has 
to penetrate the mind, and its effect upon the im- 
agination. As a psychological study of insanity, we 
learn from the Memoir^ that one of the best-known 
doctors for the insane has considered a part of it the 
most faithful representation since Shakespeare. The 
fluctuating moods, the self-absorption and continual 
suspicion, are carefully rendered. The passion of 
love comes in the form of rapture, overwhelming and 
exuberant ; the song in the garden has grown to be 
the very symbol of amorous ardour ; and is inge- 
niously placed immediately before the quarrel gen- 
erated while the brain is still hot. 

There are elements for a psychological drama as 
great as that of which Hamlet was the hero ; why, 
then, is it that no reader could fancy himself Hamlet 

' Hallam Tennyson's Alfred, Lord Tennvson. 



154 zrcnn^aon, 

without a sense or mental aggrandisement, or fancy 
himself Maud's lover without a sense of belittlement 
and silliness ? It is merely that Tennyson could not, 
or did not, conceive a noble intelligence outside the 
bounds of order and law. Hamlet in his madness 
utters philosophy so vast and so unfamiliar that he 
seems beside himself indeed, contemplating himself 
and life with an absolute and critical vision. His 
malady lifts him to another sphere, his unearthly in- 
sight and ironical reflection seem products of a mind 
raised to the n'^ power. His comprehension of all 
the various parts of thought is at the root of his in- 
decision. The hero of Maud, on the contrary, dis- 
covers a rather low intelligence. There is very little 
fine frenzy in his complaint ; he is neurotic, irritable, 
and whimpering. It is easy to pity him, but the 
sense of illimitable tragedy is wanting, since there is 
no indication that in the best of health he would have 
been other than an ineffectual, gelatinous sort of per- 
son. And in his calamity he justly describes himself 
as 

** splenetic, personal, base, 

A wounded thing with a rancorous cry." 

Could we for a moment imagine him uttering, in 
whatever pride of sanity or eloquence of delirium, 
words so magnificently contemptuous of human 
littleness as these': 

" Forgive me this my virtue ; 
For in the fatness of these pursy times 
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg, 
Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good ?" 



*'f»auJ)/' 155 

To prove that Maud is not Hamlet is a tolerably 
simple task, but it can hardly be a dismissal. The 
poem contains many great and obvious beauties and 
many technical charms not so readily discoverable by 
the lay reader. What Ruskin called ''the pathetic 
fallacy " is particularly in evidence, and not even a 
Ruskinian should object to it as the outcome of sleep- 
less mania. It is one of the unenviable privileges of 
madness to read its ov/n intoxication into nature and 
man, so the reader may as well seize the opportunity 
to enjoy with a clear conscience the whispering lily 
and listening larkspur, the rose '' awake all night for 
your sake," and the 

" Innumerable, pitiless, passionless eyes " 

of the stars in 'Mron skies." And if in meekness we 
accept this attitude toward Nature, we shall be re- 
warded by very delightful glimpses of her multitudin- 
ous phenomena. The pink-lined English daisy bends 
to show the path that Maud has followed, 

' * For her feet have touch'd the meadows and left the daisies rosy " ; 

the ''madden'd beach dragg'd down by the wave" 
screams as the water grates on its pebbles, and in the 
bland and bountiful season 

** A million emeralds break from the ruby-budded lime" ; 

the ''dry-tongued laurels" imitate a light step with 
their ''pattering talk," and the dark cedar sighs for 
Lebanon. For the exact mind there is also much of 



156 ?i;enn?6on. 

the charm of accuracy in these allusions. Once in 
Notes and Queries the line, 

**The May-fly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow spear'd by 
the shrike," 

was called into question by a correspondent who 
thought the butcher-bird flew at nothing larger than 
beetles and flies. A cloud of witnesses at once arose 
to prove Tennyson right, giving instances of small 
birds having been attacked by the shrike. The cap- 
tious correspondent declined to be convinced by any- 
thing less than the precise case of a sparrow victimised 
by a shrike, and such an instance was finally pro- 
duced. Undoubtedly, Tennyson had himself seen 
just such a tragedy as he described. This precision 
of statement occasionally gives way when terms of 
music are involved, for in spite of the musical quality 
of Tennyson's verse, he seems to have had no techni- 
cal knowledge of the art. Mr. Krehbiel demands the 
explanation of an orchestra consisting of a ''flute, 
violin, and bassoon," and inquires with mild special- 
istic scorn what the poet means when he says, 

" All night has the casement jessamine stirr'd 
To the dancers dancing in tune?" 

''Unless the dancers who wearied Maud were pro- 
vided with even a more extraordinary instrumental 
outfit than the Old Lady of Banbury Cross, how 
could they have danced ' in tune ' ? " he asks.^ 
The delicate traits of Tennyson's poetry are neces- 

* Krehbiel's How to Listen to Music. 



it 



fIDaub/' 157 



sarily puzzling to a translator into a foreign tongue. 
M. Henri Fauvel has put Maud into French, and 
the London Spectator, though regarding the result as 
a '' masterpiece " of translation, quotes some passages 
in which the sympathetic Frenchman was clearly 
baffled. 

Where the English reads, 

** And lust of gain, in the spirit of Cain, is it better or worse 
Than the heart of the citizen hissing in war on his own hearth- 
stone ? " 

the French gives, 

" Et ceux qui, dans I'esprit de Cain ont le desir du gain, 
valent-ils mieux ou moins que le coeur du citoyen qui gerroie 
en sifflant sur son propre foyer." 

Where the hero trusts that if an enemy's fleet 

" came yonder round by the hill," 

the ''smooth-faced, snub-nosed rogue" would 

*' strike if he could, were it but with his cheating yard 



wand, home," 

M. Fauvel, who may have had some haunting 
memory of ''Strike for your altars and your fires," 
puts it, 

'' Et frapperait s'il le pouvait, fut ce meme avec son aune fri- 
ponne pour defendre son toit." 

This, the Spectator, in the spirit of one who hopes 
himself to be forgiven, considers " a pardonable mis- 
take." The rendering 

" Le spectre de I'etre que je connais bien," 



158 ^enn?0on* 

for 

**The ghastly Wraith of one that I know," 

is also pardonable, and almost as infelicitous as 
Scherer's " quand Lucy a termine son existence " for 
Wordsworth's '' when Lucy ceased to be." 

In spite, however, of these and other less im- 
portant lapses, the Spectator assures its readers that 
'' for all students who have any of the poetic element 
in them, this work will have a special fascination, so 
beautiful is the wording, so choice and so elegant 
are M. Fauvel's expressions, so light and delicate his 
hand in dealing with those rare beauties that 
abound in Maud and which are unsullied by his 
rendering." 

When Maud first appeared it was decidedly with- 
out honour in its own country. The hero's pre- 
dilection for war made him numerous enemies, and 
the public insisted upon regarding the poem as the 
expression of Tennyson's own sentiments in obedi- 
ence to what we may call the biographical fallacy in 
the mind of the average critic. Even Mr. Gladstone 
dwelt upon the ethical and social significance of the 
hero's rage against the existing order of evil, quite 
overlooking the "purple patches" of poetic beauty. 
Quoting the passage, 

" When a Mammonite mother kills her babe for a burial fee,' 
And Timour-Mammon grins on a pile of children's bones, 
Is it peace or war ? better, war ! loud war by land and by sea, 
War with a thousand battles and shaking a hundred thrones," 



*'flDaut)/' 159 

he comments upon it in a tone that will be used by a 
certain class of thinkers so long as wars are made. 

''War, indeed," he says, ''has the property of 
exciting much generous and noble feeling on a large 
scale ; but with this special recommendation, it has, 
in its modern forms especially, peculiar and unequalled 
evils. As it has a wider sweep of desolating power 
than the rest, so it has the peculiar quality that it is 
more susceptible of being decked in gaudy trappings, 
and of fascinating the imagination of those whose 
proud and angry passions it inflames. But it is on 
this very account a perilous delusion to teach that 
war is a cure for moral evil in any other sense than 
as the sister tribulations are. The eulogies of the 
frantic hero in Maud, however, deviate into grosser 
folly. It is natural that such vagaries should over- 
look the fixed laws of Providence. Under these 
laws the mass of mankind is composed of men, wo- 
men, and children who can but just ward off hunger, 
cold, and nakedness ; whose whole ideas of Mammon- 
worship are comprised in the search for their daily 
food, clothing, shelter, fuel ; whom any casualty 
reduces to positive want ; and whose already low es- 
tate is yet lowered and ground down, when ' the 
blood-red blossom of war flames with its heart of 
fire.' But what is a little strange is, that war should 
be recommended as a specific for the particular evil 
of Mammon-worship. . . . There is no incentive 
to Mammon-worship so remarkable as that which it 
affords. The political economy of war is now one of 



i6o ZTennpeon. 

its most commanding aspects. Every farthing, with 
the smallest exceptions conceivable, of the scores or 
hundreds of millions which a war may cost, goes 
directly, and very violently, to stimulate production, 
though it is intended ultimately for waste or for de- 
struction. Even apart from the fact that war sus- 
pends, ipso facto, every rule of public thrift, and tends 
to sap honesty itself in the use of the public treasure 
for which it makes such unbounded calls, it therefore 
is the greatest feeder of that lust of gold which we 
are told is the essence of commerce, though we had 
hoped it was only its occasional besetting sin. It is, 
however, more than this ; for the regular commerce 
of peace is tameness itself compared with the gam- 
bling spirit which war, through the rapid shiftings 
and high prices which it brings, always introduces 
into trade. In its moral operation it more resembles, 
perhaps, the finding of a new gold-field than anything 
else."' And considerably more to much the same 
effect. 

Reading this suggests Symond's description of the 
two men, Gladstone and Tennyson, as he saw them 
together at Woolner's house : Gladstone more or 
less a man of the world, Tennyson ''a child," and 
'' Gladstone treated him as a child." But Gladstone 
certainly misread the intention of Maud, and long 
afterward published a note to the criticism as it ap- 
peared in the Gleanings, confessing that his frame of 
mind at the time was dislocated by the war spirit 

* Gladstone's Gleanings from Past Years. 



^^nDau5/' i6i 

abroad, and concluding what Tennyson himself con- 
sidered the recantation of ''a noble-minded man" 
with the words, '' Even as regards the passages de- 
voted to war-frenzy, equity should have reminded me 
of the fine lines in the latter portion of X. 3 (Part I.), 
and of the emphatic words, V. 1 1 (Part II.), 

* I swear to you lawful and lawless war 
Are scarcely even akin.' " 

The recantation was made after hearing Tenny- 
son read Maud aloud, and no one who has put 
that experience upon record seems to have escaped 
its peculiar fascination. In one of her letters, Mrs. 
Browning gives a very characteristic account of it. 

''One of the pleasantest things which has hap- 
pened to us here," she says, 'Ms the coming down on 
us of the Laureate, who, being in London for three or 
four days from the Isle of Wight, spent two of them 
with us, dined with us, smoked with us, opened his 
heart to us (and the second bottle of port), and ended 
by reading Maud through from end to end, and going 
away at half past two in the morning. If I had had 
a heart to spare, certainly he would have won mine. 
He is captivating with his frankness, confidingness, 
and unexampled naivete! Think of his stopping in 
Maud every now and then—' There 's a wonderful 
touch ! That 's very tender. How beautiful that is ! ' 
Yes, and it was wonderful, tender, beautiful, and he 
read exquisitely in a voice like an organ, rather music 
than speech." One little detail with a certain inter- 



i62 ZTenn^eon* 

est is contributed by a writer in Notes and Queries, 
who remembers that Tennyson, in reading the line, 

"And thunder'd up into Heaven the Christless code," 

made the / in ''Christless " short. 

Mrs. Browning's estimate of Maud was more 
favourable than one might have expected. 

''The winding up," she writes to Mrs. Jameson, 
" is magnificent, full of power, and there are beauti- 
ful thrilling bits before you get so far. Still there is 
an appearance of labour in the early part ; the language 
is rather encrusted by skill than spontaneously blos- 
soming, and the rhythm is not always happy. The 
poet seems to aim at more breadth and freedom, 
which he attains, but at the expense of his character- 
istic delicious music. People in general appear very 
unfavourably impressed by this poem, very unjustly, 
Robert and 1 think. On some points it is even an 
advance. The sale is great, nearly five thousand 
copies already.'' This was in August, 1855. 

Tennyson himself was very fond of his Maud, 
continually choosing it to read aloud to his favoured 
visitors ; and, as prejudices fled before the reading as 
chaff before the wind, there must have been a species 
of magic in his sympathetic rendering of his own 
work. His favourite among the published criticisms 
was Dr. Mann's little book called ''Maud'' Vindi- 
cated, in which the intention ot the poem is dis- 
cerned, and the position of the unfriendly critics 
assailed. 



♦'flOaub." 1 6 



o 



It was while Tennyson was reading Maud to 
the Brownings that Rossetti made the well-known 
thumbnail sketch of him, as he sat curled up on the 
sofa, chin pushed-forward, hair in disorder, one hand 
gripping his foot, and the other holding open the 
recently published volume. The sketch has wonder- 
ful freedom and vigour, and brings to mind the event 
of 1857 which to some few people seems as import- 
ant as the appearance of Maud: the publication of 
Moxon's illustrated quarto edition of the Poems, with 
Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt on the staff of 
illustrators. To get an idea of the reception of this 
inexpressibly charming volume by the conventional 
art critic of the time, we need only glance at this 
naive notice in the Art Journal for 1857 : 

''The peculiarity of Tennyson's style of writing, 
imaginative and highly coloured, but frequently open 
to the charge of affectation, was perhaps, in some de- 
gree, a justifiable reason for enlisting the services of 
the Pre-Raffaellite school of artists in the work of 
illustration, yet we are much inclined to doubt 
whether their aid will be generally considered to 
have given much additional value to the volume. 
The quaintness of thought and expression that is 
found in the verse needed not necessarily to be fol- 
lowed by quaintness of pictorial design. The artist 
may work harmoniously with the poet without any 
participation in the peculiarities of the latter ; when 
these peculiarities have a constrained or affected 
tendency ; he must work from, as well as up to, his 



1 64 Zrenn^eon. 

model ; but then we look for his own ideas of the 
subject before him, expressed in the true language of 
pictorial art, and not in that of any particular school 
or creed. Tennyson's heroes and heroines are not all 
men and women of the mediaeval ages : but even 
when they belong to it, we would not have them 
drawn strictly after the fashion of the art of that pe- 
riod." After briefly noticing Mulready, Maclise, Stan- 
field, Creswick, and Horsley, the reviewer continues 
with bland condescension and kind expostulation : 

''We now come to the Pre-Raffaellite school of 
artists, of which Millais claims the first notice as the 
largest contributor, eighteen being the number of de- 
signs to which his name is affixed : the majority of 
these show far less of the peculiarities of the artist 
than might be expected from his constancy to his 
adopted style ; and among them are a few to which 
no one, we imagine, would take objection, and which 
are fine in conception and feeling, and by no means 
deficient in pictorial beauty : [Praise !] such qualities 
will generally be acknowledged in the second illus- 
tration of the poem ' A Dream of Fair Women,' re- 
presenting Queen Eleanor, 

* Who kneeling, with one arm about her king, 
Drew forth the poison with her balmy breath, 
Sweet as new buds in Spring,' 

in the frontispiece to 'The Talking Oak,' and in that 
to ' Lord of Burleigh.' Holman Hunt has furnished 
seven subjects for the volume : most graceful and poeti- 



I 



**flDau&/' 165 

cal is the Mussulman sailing down the Tigris, one of 
two designs illustrating the ' Recollections of the 
Arabian Nights'; the frontispiece to The Lady of Sha- 
lott " is a strange fancy that none but an artist of 
genius could have invented, but the lady is not drawn 
after the Pre-Raffaellite fashion. Five subjects are 
from the pencil of Rossetti : with the exception of Sir 
Galahad, a vigorous and effective study, but, so far 
as we can make it out, without the slightest refer- 
ence to any descriptive line in the poem it professes 
to illustrate, these designs are beyond the pale of 
criticism ; if Millais and Hunt have shown something 
like an inclination to abjure their artistic creed, Ros- 
setti seems to revel in its wildest extravagances : can 
he suppose that such art as he here exhibits can be ad- 
mired ? Is it not more calculated to provoke ridicule, 
or, if not ridicule, pity, for one who can so misapply 
his talents ? 

" It is fortunate for the engravers, Messrs. Dalziel, 
T. Williams, W. j. Linton, Green, and Thompson, 
that they are not responsible for anything but what 
has been placed in their hands to engrave ; that they 
have had to do they have done with their accustomed 
skill ; we could only wish that subjects more worthy 
of their time and labour than some we could point 
out had been entrusted to them. However, the Pre- 
Raffaelite school has many admirers, and Tennyson 
has more, so there need be little apprehension of this 
volume not finding a home in many households." 

There is a certain comforting sense of justice in 



1 66 ZTennpeon^ 

reproducing this delectable criticism at a moment 
when so few households acquainted with what is 
most to be prized in art would fail to give welcome 
to this volume, burdened by designs "beyond the 
pale of criticism " ! 

An admirable statement of the way in which 
competent critics now regard the volume and the 
illustrators is found in Mr. Layard's interesting and 
suggestive book, Tennyson and his Pre-Raphaelite 
Illustrators. 

'' Millais' illustrations," he says, '' are as immedi- 
ately and directly inspired by the poet as Rossetti's 
are not. Except in one amusing instance, where the 
former has tried to emulate his brother 'P. R.'s,' 
Millais and Tennyson have gone hand in hand. 
Hunt and Rossetti have sometimes sprung ahead ; 
sometimes, it is true, they have fallen behind. So that, 
judged by the ethics of book-illustrating, Millais most 
undoubtedly bears the palm. To put it broadly, Millais 
has realised, Holman Hunt has idealised, and Rossetti 
has sublimated, or transcendentalised, the subjects 
which they have respectively illustrated. The two lat- 
ter have, in greater or less degree, introduced subtleties 
which Tennyson never dreamed of. Rossetti, indeed, 
has done more. He has not hesitated to contradict 
the text. Trollope, writing upon the illustrations to 
his novels, has said : ' An artist will frequently dislike 
to subordinate his ideas to those of an author.' And 
I think it will be evident to the student of these illus- 
trations that Rossetti's main object has not been to 



^^fiDaub/' 167 

' promote the views of the poet, but that he has un- 
hesitatingly attempted to overpower the text, and in 
some cases successfully, by the brilliancy of his own 
imagination. This will not be surprising to those 
who were acquainted with the artist's temperament, 
and, after all, it is easy to forgive him in view of the 
splendid, albeit unorthodox achievement. Nor can 
it be doubted that the picture-lover pure and simple 
will be thrilled to the finest fibre of his nature by 
Rossetti's divergences, rather than by the rhythmic 
harmonies of Millais ; but, in the opinion of the well- 
balanced mind, that looks for the lawful wedding of 
pen and pencil, the latter unquestionably surpasses 
his rivals. 

"There is, however, one general characteristic 
common to the work of this great brotherhood upon 
which I should like to dwell for a moment, and which 
cannot be, in these days of scamped and hurried 
work, running riot under the garb of ' impressionism,' 
too often and too strongly insisted upon. 1 mean 
the finish, the wealth of detail, the conscientious 
completeness which, although one of them at least 
was working for his immediate bread-and-butter, and 
one at least was eaten up with the impatience of 
genius, distinguish their work." 

The excellence of this criticism will be sufficiently 
apparent to those so fortunate as to own the illus- 
trated edition. The picture that has roused the most 
widely different opinions is, perhaps, the St. Cecily, 
built upon the four lines : 



1 68 S;cnn?60tL 

** In a clear-wall'd city on the sea, 
Near gilded organ-pipes, her hair 
Wound with white roses, slept St. Cecily ; 
An angel look'd at her." 

*' Who but an artist of the utmost originality," Mr. 
Layard demands, ''could have begotten a design of 
such apparently alien significance ? " Cecily is on 
her knees before an organ, her hands limply resting 
on the keys. Her head is bent back, and her hair, 
the wonderful, crinkling hair of Rossetti's women, 
streams about her. The angel who embraces her 
is wrapped in a starry mantle. His hair is like that 
of an Italian model, tumbling in a shock about his 
head. Folded wings, or, according to Mr. Layard 
and Mr. Hunt, ''winglike somethings," are at his 
back, with no indication of where they belong or 
whether they belong at all. On the background are 
little towers and cannon and little men busily toiling. 
A miniature tree grows in a round court ; there are 
ships and water beyond the city walls. A dial is 
back of the organ, and down in a corner of the fore- 
ground a soldier with a spear is munching an apple. 
A white dove is flying out of the darkness of what 
apparently is a tomb. No one could imagine more 
intricacy or less conventionality. To anyone familiar 
with Rossetti's painting the whole flashes at once into 
colour ; the mantle is blue, with golden stars, red 
gleaming hair pours over it, unexpected patches of 
green and yellow come out against the grey walls. 
Mr. Layard finds the whole conception highly incon- 



^'flDaut)/' 169 

gruous with the spirit of the poem ; especially does 
he consider the angel "a great voluptuous human 
being, not merely kissing (a sufficient incongruity in 
itself) but seemingly munching the fair face of the 
lovely martyr," something very like a grim joke on 
the part of Rossetti, with the possible explanation 
that the artist's intention was to draw, not an angel, 
but a man masquerading as an angel. 

He says that Mr. Fairfax Murray, on the other 
hand, regards the picture as a serious attempt at illus- 
tration, and ''believes that the hands of the angel 
are wrapped in the cloak by way of emphasising his 
reverence for the saintly lady." Both critics assume 
that the angel's mouth is ''wide open," Mr. Layard 
with the idea in his mind of " munching " kisses, and 
Mr. Murray ascribing it to a mistake on the part of 
the engraver. 

But the angel's mouth, if one looks a little closely, 
is not open at all ; the face from the nose down seems 
to be hidden by Cecily's head, "wound with white 
roses," and one of the white roses makes a queer 
accent on the angel's cheek which, by a lively imagin- 
ation, may be distorted into a wide-stretched under 
lip. If it were an under lip, as Mr. Layard evidently 
thinks it is, the lovely outline of Cecily's brow would 
be actually bitten off instead of curving back under 
the roses to be lost in the heavy hair. This it is im- 
possible to suppose when one remembers Rossetti's 
passion for that particular exquisite line. Surely not 
even the desire for a grim joke would have led him 



I70 zrenn?6on» 

to sacrifice it to pure ugliness. The fact that it is 
not emphasised, but interrupted by the spotty white- 
ness of the rose, is probably due to careless engraving, 
as Mr. Murray suggested. 

For the rest, Mr. Layard seems somewhat to have 
lost sight of the idea of tapestry in finding the illus- 
tration so wide of Tennyson's mark. When we con- 
sider that the palace was full of rooms, 

*' fit for every mood 



And change of my still soul," 

and that the design Rossetti undertook was supposed 
to be on an arras — some old-fashioned bit of tapestry, 
wrought in silk — we may see it a little differently. 
The curious background crowded with objects all 
out of perspective, the mediaeval figures, the lack of 
anything like atmospheric truth — who has not ob- 
served something like it on the tapestries conserved 
by museums ? The angel and Cecily, however, are 
not to be ascribed to any influence but that of Ros- 
setti's own mind, and none could be more incompre- 
hensible. 

In Millais's famous drawing of little St. Agnes in 
her night-robe, holding a candle that shines more 
dimly than the light sky and moonlit snow, there is 
no such complication. The young, exalted face, and 
slim form in the straight-hanging gown among the 
bare surroundings, are perfectly expressive of Tenny- 
son's poem. Even the white robes are dark 

*'To yonder shining ground," 



'*flDaut)/' 171 

as the ''taper's earthly spark" is pale to the bright- 
ness shed by 

** yonder argent round." 



Mr. Layard reproduces an unpublished water- 
colour drawing of the same subject by Mrs. Rossetti, 
in which we see a little what the treatment might 
have been under the inspiration of Rossetti's mys- 
ticism. There is slight difference in the detail ; the 
girl in white is almost equally severe, but Millais's 
is the German and Mrs. Rossetti's the Italian render- 
ing. A single stanza of a German translation of '* St. 
Agnes' Eve "^ will show the kinship of Tennyson's 
thought to the German thought on such a theme as 
this, as well as the difference in the two styles of ex- 
pression : 

II. 

*' Wie schmutzig grau mein weiss Gewand 

Zu jenem hellen Grund ; 
Wie dieser Kerze ird'scher Brand, 

Zu jenem Silberrund ; 
So tritt zum Lamm die Seele hin, 

Und so zu Dir mein Geist ; 
So auch im ird'schen Haus ich bin, 

Zu dem, was Du verheisst. 
Thu' auf den Himmel, Herr ! und fern - 

Durch alles Sternlicht heiss 
Mich, Deine Braut, gehn wie ein Stern 
. In Kleidern rein und weiss." 

This might easily be a German original, the meta- 

' Made by Professor Delius, of Bonn, in tJ^otes and Queries. 



172 ITennpaon* 

phors lend themselves so readily to a simple and 
childlike translation ; for example : 

'* In Kleidern rein und weiss " — 

could anything be more representative of the Ger- 
man idea of purity and fitness than those clean, white 
clothes ? And could any other than Millais have 
made so pure and neat a maiden to match the senti- 
ment of the poem ? 

The drawing by Holman Hunt of The Lady of 
Shalott is a fair example of the third member of the 
interesting trio. It would be hard to describe the ef- 
fect of gloom and fatality given by the droop of the 
Lady's figure tangled in the loosened web, and the 
down-sinking of the beautiful, noble head against 
the strong curve of the shoulder. It would be impos- 
sible to convey in words the way in which the sub- 
tle drapery is filled and modelled by the firm, sweet 
figure. Everyone owning the picture who deserves 
to own it knows that he has a possession not to 
be duplicated or challenged by this generation of 
illustrators, although the dawn of Mr. Alexander 
promises a new joy. 

Concerning the picture of The Lady of Shalott, 
Mr. Layard quotes a pertinent story : 

'' ' My dear Hunt,' said Tennyson, when he first 
saw this illustration, ' 1 never said that the young 
woman's hair was flying all over the shop.' 

'''No,' said Hunt; 'but you never said it 
was n't,' and after a little the poet came to be wholly 



f( 



flDaut)/' 173 



reconciled to it. Not so easily did he allow himself 
to be pacified, however, when he saw the long flight 
of steps which King Cophetua descends to meet and 
greet the Beggar Maid, on p. 359. 

'' ' 1 never said,' he complained, ' that there were 
a lot of steps ; I only meant one or two/ 

'''But,' said Hunt, 'the old ballad says there 
was a flight of them.' 

"'1 dare say it does,' remonstrated Tennyson; 
'but I never said I got it from the old ballad.' 

" 'Well, but,' retorted Hunt, 'the flight of steps 
does n't contradict your account ; you merely say : 
" In robe and crown the King stept down.'' ' 

" But Tennyson would not be appeased, and kept 
on declaring that he never meant more than two 
steps at the outside." 

There could hardly have been a more appropriate 
union of poet with illustrator than that of Tennyson 
with the Pre-Raphaelites. In his attention to sym- 
bolic and significant detail, in his determination to 
slur nothing over, in his inability to leave vague 
spaces and delicately suggestive borderlands of im- 
agination, in his modernity and liking for archaic sub- 
jects, in his sincerity and mannerism, he was himself 
a Pre-Raphaelite of the Pre-Raphaelites ; and the 
student of the illustrated edition of 1857 has a fine 
opportunity to trace the various effects of picture 
upon text and text upon picture, inter-illustrating and 
inter-illuminating as they are. 

On the practical side of the question, it is rather 



174 ITenn^eon. 

interesting to learn from Mr. William Rossetti the 
methods of at least one of the three artists. To Ros- 
setti wood-cut designs were "afflictive." The Pre- 
Raphaelites were in the habit of drawing directly on 
the block, and Mr. William Rossetti writes that on 
August 2, 1856, Rossetti was '' at the last gasp of time 
with the designs which he had undertaken to pro- 
duce " for the Tennyson volume. '' He foresaw that, 
with a view to working upon the blocks which yet 
remained to be done, he would have to fly London 
and Moxon, as he could not endure the publisher's 
pestering. I judge that he received £')o per design : 
as I find in one of his letters the phrase ' Moxon owes 
me /30, as I have done the King Arthur block.' 
He preferred Linton as a wood-engraver to the Dal- 
ziels ; and was particularly pleased with his second 
proof of the Mariana subject. Another letter — ad- 
dressed this time to Mr. Moxon — sets forth that the 
design of The Lady of Shalott, though delayed for 
a week, would be soon ready : ' I have drawn it 
twice over, for the sake of an alteration, so you see 
I do not spare trouble.' He speaks also of the block 
for Sir Galahad, and of a second Sir Galahad which 
he intended to do without delay ; this intention, 
it appears, must have miscarried, for there is not 
in the Tennyson volume any second illustration to 
the poem in question.'" 

Mr. Layard thinks that Tennyson was quite indif- 
ferent about the pictures, in striking contrast to the 

' W. M. Rossetti's Memoir of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 



''flDaub/' 175 

attitude of many writers toward illustrations of their 
work. In the Memoir, however, Hallam Tennyson 
says that his father took a great interest, calling on 
most of the artists '' so as to give them his views of 
what the illustrations ought to be." 

Many writers about Tennyson seem to have the 
idea that he cared little for pictorial art, anyway, but 
a contributor to Notes and Qjieries speaks of having 
several pen-and-ink sketches by Tennyson, copies 
made in his boyhood of Maclise's portraits mFraser's 
Magazine. "They are very clever and spirited in- 
deed," he says, '' and show more than ordinary artis- 
tic ability." And Caroline Fox speaks of Holman 
Hunt's surprise at the "spirited, suggestive little 
paintings of strange beasts " which Tennyson had 
"painted on the windows of his summer-house to 
shut out an ugly view." 




CHAPTER IX. 
THE "IDYLLS OF THE KIT^G." 

WHEK, in 1885, Tennyson introduced " Balin 
and Balan " into the volume called Tire- 
sias and Other Poems, he doubtless felt 
that he had completed his masterpiece. The scheme 
that, in 1833, had been heralded by the sweet piping 
note of "The Lady of Shalott " was now closed, and 
the material for the final edition of the Idylls of the 
King was all in hand. For more than half a century 
the " Romance of the Round Table" had been at its 
work of suggestion in the poet's mind, and he had 
responded as only an artist of exceptional patience 
and persistence of purpose could have responded. 
From the Memoir we find that he had in the early 
years two schemes, between which he was unde- 
cided, for his treatment of the Arthurian legends : the 
epic form, and a "musical masque" in five acts. 
After 1840 he clung to the epical idea, and called 
his Arthurian poems " Idylls," possibly with some 
reference to the Greek ctSo,, shape, or image, for the 
conventional definition of the word fits them not at 
all. When, in 1859, the first edition of Idylls of the 

176 



Zbc ''Hi^^lle of tbe Iking." 177 

King was published, Mr. Gladstone, in his review of 
it, said : 

''The Arthurian Romance has every recommenda- 
tion that should win its way to the homage of a 
great poet. It is national ; it is Christian. It is also 
human in the largest and deepest sense ; and, there- 
fore, though highly national, it is universal ; for it 
rests upon those depths and breadths of our nature, 
to which all its truly great developments, in all 
nations, are alike essentially and closely related. 
The distance is enough for atmosphere, not too much 
for detail ; enough for romance, not too much for 
sympathy. A poet of the nineteenth century, the 
Laureate has in the main appropriated and adopted 
characters, incidents, and even language, instead of 
attempting to project them, on a basis of his own, in 
the region of illimitable fancy. But he has done 
much more than this. Evidently by reading and by 
deep meditation, as well as by sheer force of genius, 
he has penetrated himself, down to the very core of 
his being, in the representation with which he deals ; 
and as others, using old materials, have been free to 
alter them in the sense of vulgarity or licence, so he has 
claimed and used the right to sever and recombine, 
to enlarge, retrench, and modify for the purposes at 
once of a more powerful and elaborate art than his 
original presents, and of a yet more elevated, or at 
least of a far more sustained, ethical and Christian 
strain."' 

* Gladstone's Gleanings of Tast Years. 



I7B ^enn?6on» 

Among the later critics, some have endorsed this 
opinion ; others have complained of the " more elab- 
orate art " and of the attempt to bring the elements 
of the old fables into relation with new conditions of 
thought and language ; others still have held that 
the introduction of a moral or ethical purpose weak- 
ened the author's hold upon his characters. One 
other has thought that ''the moral tone of the Ar- 
thurian story has been on the whole lowered and 
degraded by Mr. Tennyson's mode of treatment. " ^ 

One claim for the Idylls must, however, remain 
always true ; they have awakened in the old story a 
popular interest which the more classic and duller 
versions of it by other modern poets failed to arouse, 
and which might have slept indefinitely had Tenny- 
son not chosen this subject made to his hand. And, 
as usual, popular interest has been very well satisfied 
to accept the modern conception without much effort 
at comparison with the sources. The exigent critics 
have felt and expressed a vague dissatisfaction with 
Tennyson's readiness to entrust the precious chief 
work of fifty years to the hired service of old legends, 
and perhaps it is this, more than any quarrel with 
the lovely workmanship, that has led them to as- 
sume a somewhat disheartened tone in discussing 
the merits of the Idylls. They have asked them- 
selves whether, if Tennyson had chosen to originate 
a drama, or a fable, or a long romance, to typify the 
struggle between good and evil, and the eternal 

^ Swinburne's Under the Microscope. 



Zbc *^1I&^II0 of tbe Iking/' 179 

character of the former, he would not have made a 
deeper appeal to the real heart of the world. They 
have argued that some pulse would have throbbed, 
as in Maud, with an actual emotion stronger than is 
conveyed by the joys and sorrows of uncontempo- 
rary people decked out with the ornaments of con- 
temporary diction ; even though the result had 
seemed for a moment a failure, instead of a success 
measured by a sale of ten thousand copies the first 
week of publication. Tennyson risked failure of the 
obvious sort no more than a skilful painter who 
should take an old series of Crucifixions by the great 
simple masters, and copy on his own canvas a 
group here and a group there, and redraw the muti- 
lated human figure of the Christ until it was aca- 
demically beautiful, and refine the colour and correct 
the lines of the whole. It would not be a very diffi- 
cult task for an accomplished painter ; but the new 
picture would probably lack that inexpressible beauty 
of verity, that air of inherent likeness between the 
mind conceiving and the thing conceived, which in 
the actual world marks the relation between parents 
and children, and makes the bond of adoption seem 
fragile and pitiable. Such art could have neither 
youth nor age, nor any immortal vitality. 

But the multitude who know very little or nothing 
at all of the hero of " Geoffrey's book, or him of Mal- 
leor's," or of Mabinogion, get a different idea of the 
Idylls, which to them are new ground abloom with 
the bright flowers of modernity. And even if Thomas 



i8o ^ennpaom 

Malory's splendid old chronicles were given to them 
in one hand and Tennyson's Idylls in the other, is 
there any doubt which they would read, or which 
would seem to them their own intellectual posses- 
sion ? Malory might take his little procession of 
time-stained kings, and dusty knights, and faded 
ladies, back to the book-shelves, while the new pub- 
lic went hand in hand with the new Arthur in his 
courtly finery of moral sentiment, and with the new 
Guinevere in her sweet, self-conscious posing, along 
the smooth highway of the nineteenth century. It is 
the same impulse that leads a woman to clothe her- 
self in the silks and laces of the period while the 
gowns of her grandmother, of a plainer style, per- 
haps, and a stouter lining, lie in the chests that pre- 
serve and conceal them ; it is the instinct that has 
produced the double rose, that has given us our 
summer fruits at Easter, that has forced nature and 
art and science to cater to contemporary taste ; it is, 
in brief, the genius of modernity, without which to- 
day would be as yesterday, that has made Tennyson 
for the greater number of his readers the creator as 
well as the re-creator of the Arthurian cycle. The 
service is the same in kind that Shakespeare rendered 
to his generation in immortalising old plots and ver- 
sions, the difference is merely in manner and degree, 
and as yet it is dangerous to venture any generalisa- 
tion as to the class of minds that in the future will 
accept Tennyson for their intellectual leader, since for 
the present it is plain that he has driven with the 



^be ''nm of tbe Mixq:' i8i 

wind in draping and ornamenting the archaic sim- 
plicity of the ancient legends. 

To get a suggestion of the way in which Tenny- 
son's mind has played about its priceless material, we 
need only compare certain passages from the Idj^'lls 
with corresponding passages from Malory's History, 
and observe the indicative correspondences and de- 
partures. We may take a part of ''Lancelot and 
Elaine," that being the story from which the early 
'' Lady of Shalott " was extracted, and one of those 
in which the original is most closely followed. Be- 
ginning with ''the great lamentation that the faire 
maide of Astolat made when Sir Launcelot should 
depart," we find Malory's version^ very direct and 
singularly free from hysterical wording : 

"'My lord sir Launcelot,'" Elaine pleads with 
pathetic gentleness and sincerity, " 'now 1 see that 
yee will depart ; faire and curteous knight, have 
mercy upon mee, and suffer mee not to die for your 
love.' ' What would yee that I did ? ' said sir Laun- 
celot. 'I would have you unto my husband,' said 
the maide Elaine. 'Faire damosell, I thanke you,' 
said sir Launcelot, 'but certainely,' said hee, '1 cast 
mee never to bee married.' " 

Tennyson's version runs : 

" then out she brake : 



' Going ? and we shall never see you more. 
And I must die for want of one bold word.' 
* Speak : that I live to hear,' he said, Ms yours.' 
Then suddenly and passionately she spoke : 

'Thomas Wright's edition of the text of 1634. 



i82 ^enn?5oii. 

' I have gone mad. I love you : let me die.' 

' Ah, sister,' answer'd Lancelot, 'what is this.^' 

And innocently extending her white arms, 

* Your love,' she said, 'your love — to be your wife.' 

And Lancelot answer'd, ' Had 1 chosen to wed, 

I had been wedded earlier, sweet Elaine : 

But now there never will be wife of mine.' " 

Even while we recognise the delicacy and beauty 
of his rendering, we can but feel that Tennyson has 
too much sophisticated this passage. He has cer- 
tainly brought it well into the nineteenth century. 
Malory's Elaine never thought of dying ''for want of 
one bold word " ; her concern was to let Lancelot 
know her trouble very plainly, and to beseech his 
favour ; nothing could be more delightfully simple 
than her reply to his question : '' ' I would have you 
unto my husband,' said the maide Elaine." But 
Tennyson's Elaine is overcome by the thought of her 
temerity ; she admits that she has gone mad to dare 
such a confession : " ' 1 love you : let me die ! ' " One 
gets the impression that the avowal and not the love 
is the dying matter. The little Elaine of the History 
desired to die only if Lancelot should fail to recipro- 
cate her passion. After Lancelot had gone, and the 
letter had been written 'Mike as shee had devised," 
then "shee prayed her father that shee might bee 
watched untill shee were dead." This sad little 
touch is left out in the Idyll, and also the spirited 
answer to the ghostly father who "bad her leave 
such thoughts " ; and Elaine begins her final request 
with a somewhat elaborate prelude : 



^be "llb^Ils of tbe Iking." 183 

" ' O sweet father, tender and true, 

Deny me not,' she said — ' ye never yet 

Denied my fancies — this however strange, 

My latest ; lay the letter in my hand 

A little ere 1 die, and close the hand 

Upon it ; 1 shall guard it even in death. 

And when the heat is gone from out my heart, 

Then take the little bed on which I died 

For Lancelot's love, and deck it like the Queen's 

For richness, and me also like the Queen 

In all I have of rich, and lay me on it. 

And let there be prepared a chariot-bier 

To take me to the river, and a barge 

Be ready on the river, clothed in black. 

I go in state to court, to meet the Queen.' " 

Save for the introductory sentence, and the fancy 
about the Queen which seems not quite in the guile- 
less style of the "faire maide," this passage is very 
close to the original, which runs : '' ' And while my 
body is whole let this letter be put into my right 
hand, and my hand bound fast with the letter untill 
that I bee cold, and let me be put in a faire bed with 
all the richest clothes that I have about me, and so 
let my bed and all my rich clothes be laide with me 
in a chariot to the next place where as the Thames is, 
and there let me be put in a barge, and but one man 
with me, such as yee trust, to stere me thither, and 
that my barge be covered with blacke samite over 
and over.' " 

In the later scene also, where the barge arrives 
before King Arthur and the Queen, with the ''faire 
gentlewoman " lying " as though shee had smiled," 
the History is followed very closely as to incident ; 



i84 ^enn^eon. 

but some additions are made which do not dignify 
the story or add to its pathos. Where in the History 
King Arthur and Queen Guinevere are speaking 
together by the window, Tennyson substitutes Lance- 
lot for the King, and puts upon the lips of Guine- 
vere a jealous tirade that brings the poem suddenly 
down almost to the level of a farce. There is plenti- 
ful indication in the History of the Queen's jealousy, 
but she is not permitted to storm and whimper at the 
moment when Elaine drifts under the window, and 
immediately before ''the queene and all the knights " 
are moved to weep ''for pittie of the dolefull com- 
plaints " in the little letter, which also is robbed of 
its pure simplicity, and made to convey a childish 
reproach. 

In the same way the Idyll of '' Enid," inspired by 
Lady Charlotte Guest's Mabinogion, shows a tendency 
to weaken the effect of the original by superfluous 
detail. The description of Enid mourning in the 
summer sunshine over Geraint's loss of valour, seems, 
curiously enough, more delicate and restrained in 
Mabinogion than in the Idyll where the Greek wor- 
ship of physical beauty is obtruded upon the archaic 
plainness of the scene. The sense of unadorned nar- 
rative dealing with every-day life is unmistakable in 
such lines as those beginning : '' And Enid was with- 
out sleep in the apartment which had windows of 
glass," while Tennyson's introduction of the Greek 
symbols in describing Geraint's splendid strength loads 
the picture, and quite destroys its charm of severity. 



^be ^^1IW16 of tbe Iking." 185 

In ''The Passing of Arthur," on the other hand, 
the elaboration is in the direction of fuller portrayal of 
character and a charming background of landscape 
which to the modern mind distinctly improves upon 
the unrelieved bareness of the early chronicle, and 
gives opportunity for such rememberable phrases as : 
" 1 have lived my life, and that which 1 have done 
may He within Himself make pure." 

The effect upon highly cultivated minds of Ten- 
nyson's selection in making up the plot of the Idylls 
is various, and we can hardly present two more op- 
posite, while equally brilliant, judgments than those 
of Mr. Swinburne and Mr. Richard Hutton. To the 
former, Tennyson has seemied to commit an artistic 
transgression, if not a crime, in eliminating from Ar- 
thur's history the youthful sin which is fastened on 
him in the old fables, and which creeps after him, 
cropping out at last in Modred's treachery. Mr. 
Swinburne is irresistibly attracted by this hint of 
Greek fatality, and would have chosen it whatever 
else were pushed aside. But he could not have kept 
it, Mr. Hutton affirms, together with the element of 
mystic spiritual glory which is " far the most charac- 
teristic and the most in keeping with the Christian 
mysticism of the San Grail legends, of the two." 
To Mr. Swinburne's assumption that the sin was 
necessary to preserve the thread of consistency in 
Arthur's fluctuating history, Mr. Hutton replies : 
'' Let anyone read either Sir Thomas Malory's book, 
or the brief, graceful, and classical compilation of 



1 86 ZCenn^aon* 

the Legends of King Arthur, by J. T. K., and then 
judge for himself whether the sin of King Arthur 
or his unearthly glory be the more deeply ingrained 
element of the two, and I suspect he will end by 
accepting as the overruling idea, and also as by far 
the better adapted for coherent treatment, the verdict 
of the old chroniclers, of Joseph of Exeter for ex- 
ample : ' The old world knows not his peer, nor will 
the future show us his equal ; he alone towers over 
all other kings, better than the past ones, and greater 
than those that are to be ' ; and again, another old 
compiler : ' In short, God has not made, since Adam 
was, the man more perfect than King Arthur.'^ It 
is perfectly evident that this tradition of unrivalled 
spiritual glory was a development of elements of the 
story quite inconsistent with that of his great sin 
and shame." 

Mr. Swinburne argues that ''from the sin of Ar- 
thur's youth proceeds the ruin of his reign and realm 
through the falsehood of his wife— a wife unloving 
and unloved." Mr. Hutton, in refutation, quotes the 
conversation upon this subject between Arthur and 
Merlin : 

''So far is Guinevere from being ' unloved ' that 
when Merlin asks Arthur, ' Is there any faire lady 
that yee love better than another ? ' he answers, ' Yea, 
I love Guinevere the King's daughter, Leodegrance 
of the land of Camelyard. which Leodegrance holdeth 

' The Memoir shows that Tennyson himself felt his ideal Arthur justified by 
precisely these passages. 



Zbc ''H^m of tbe mwQr 187 

in his power the Table Round that yee told hee had 
of my father Uther. And this demosell is the most 
gentilest and fairest lady that 1 know living, or yet 
that 1 ever could find.' 'Sir, 'said Merlin, 'as other 
beautie and fairenesse, she is one of the fairest that 
live ; but an yee loved her not so well as yee doe, I 
would finde yee a demosell of beautie and of goodnesse 
that should like yee and please yee, an your heart 
were not set. But there as a man's heart is set, he 
will be loth to return.' ' That is truth,' said Arthur ; — 
and here not only is Arthur's passion for his queen 
represented as beyond resistance, but Merlin treats 
the want of love of [in] Guinevere as the root of the 
calamities that were to come, and intimates that by 
a happier choice these calamities might have been 
avoided. And the simple truth is, that this is the 
whole drift of the legends, from the date of Arthur's 
marriage to the close. After Arthur's mysterious 
death, Guinevere freely takes upon herself and Lance- 
lot the whole guilt of the ruin of Arthur's kingdom. 
' Through this knight and mee all these warres were 
wrought, and the death of the most noble knights of 
the world ; for through our love that we have loved 
together is my most noble lord slaine. . . . For 
as well as I have loved thee, Sir Lancelot, now mine 
heart will not once serve mee to see thee ; for 
through thee and mee is the floure of kings and 
knights destroyed.' And her last prayer is not to see 
Sir Lancelot again with her bodily eyes, lest her 
earthly and disloyal love should return upon her, but 



1 88 ZTenn^eom 

that he should bury her beside her true lord and 
master, King Arthur. No one can read Sir Thomas 
Malory's book without being struck by the complete 
disappearance, as it proceeds, of all trace of remorse 
or shame in King Arthur, and by the weight of guilt 
thrown upon the passionate love of Lancelot and 
Guinevere. Obviously, if Mr. Tennyson was to keep 
to the legends which cast so mysterious a halo of 
spiritual glory around King Arthur, he had no choice 
but to ignore those which connected, CEdipus-fashion, 
his youthful sin with the final catastrophe."^ 

As to the further charge that Arthur's exclusion 
from the San Grail is only intelligible on the ground 
of his youthful guilt, Mr. Hutton considers Mr. Ten- 
nyson's opposite view entirely justified by the legends, 
claiming that Arthur '' looked upon the search for the 
San Grail as almost a disloyalty to the higher though 
humbler task that he had set himself and his knights 
— of restoring order on earth, while on the other hand, 
knights who, like Sir Lancelot, are stained with far 
deeper and more voluntary guilt than the King, even 
on Mr. Swinburne's view, is chargeable with, are al- 
lowed to join in the search." And he adds : '' 1 do 
not know anything happier or more true in its instinct, 
in English poetry, than the tone Mr. Tennyson has 
attributed to Arthur's reluctant assent to the search 
for the San Grail. It is amply justified by the old 
legends, and it j ust enables the poet to express through 
Arthur that spiritual distrust of signs and wonders 

* Hutton 's Essays, vol. ii. 



^be ''Hb^e of tbe Iking/' 189 

which, while it serves to link his faith closely with 
modern thought, is in no way inconsistent with the 
chivalric character of the whole story." 

A curious defect in Tennyson's scheme is indicated 
by Mr. Gladstone in the following passage: "It is 
but a debt of justice to the Guinevere of the romanc- 
ers," he says, ''to observe that she loses consider- 
ably by the marked transposition which Mr. Tennyson 
has effected in the order of greatness between Lance- 
lot and Arthur. With him there is an original error 
in her estimate, independently of the breach of a 
positive and sacred obligation. She prefers the in- 
ferior man ; and this preference of itself implies some 
ethical defect rooted in her nature. In the romance 
of Sir T. Malory, the preference she gives to Lance- 
lot would have been signally just, had she been free 
to choose. For Lancelot is of an indescribable grand- 
eur ; but the limit of Arthur's character is thus shown 
in certain words that he uses, and that Lancelot never 
could have spoken : ' Much more I am sorrier for my 
good knight's loss than for the loss of my queen ! for 
queens might I have enough, but such a fellowship 
of good knights shall never be together in no com- 
pany. 

From these fragments of the serious view of Ten- 
nyson's very serious and aspiring performance, it is 
interesting to turn to the criticism of one who wore 
his wisdom lightly : 

*' Oddly enough," wrote Lowell to Mr. Norton in 

* Gladstone's Gleanings of Fast Years. 



I90 ^enn?6on» 

1872, ''when I got your letter about Tennyson's 
poem, I had just finished reading a real Arthurian 
romance—' Fergus ' — not one of the best, certainly, 
but having that merit of being a genuine blossom for 
which no triumph of artifice can compensate ; having, 
in short, that woodsy hint and tantalisation of perfume 
which is so infinitely better than anything more de- 
fined. Emerson had left me Tennyson's book ; so 
last night 1 took it to bed with me and finished it at 
a gulp — reading like a naughty boy till half-past one. 
The contrast between his pomp and my old rhymer's 
simpleness was very curious and even instructive. 
One bit of the latter (which I cannot recollect else- 
where) amused me a good deal as a Yankee. When 
Fergus comes to Arthur's court and Sir Kay ' sarses ' 
him (which, you know, is de rigueur in the old 
poems), Sir Gawain saunters up whittling a stick as a 
medicine against ennui. So afterwards, when Arthur 
is dreadfully bored by hearing no news of Fergus, he 
reclines at table without any taste for his dinner, and 
whittles to purge his heart of melancholy. 1 suppose 
a modern poet would not dare to come so near Nature 
as this lest she should fling up her heels. But I am 
not yet ' aff wi' the auld love ' nor quite ' on with the 
new.' There are very fine childish things in Tenny- 
son's poem, and fine manly things too, as it seems to 
me, but 1 conceive the theory to be wrong. I have 
the same feeling (I am not wholly sure of its justice) 
that 1 have when I see these modern mediaeval pict- 
ures,— I am defrauded ; 1 do not see reality, but a 



Zl)c *'11&pll0 of tbe IkinQ." 191 

masquerade. The costumes are all that is genuine, 
and the people inside them are shams — which, 1 take 
it, is just the reverse of what ought to be. One spe- 
cial criticism 1 should make on Tennyson's new 
Idyls, and that is that the similes are so often dragged 
in by the hair. They seem to be taken (a la Tom 
Moore) from note-books, and not suggested by the 
quickened sense of association in the glow of compo- 
sition. Sometimes it almost seems as if the verses 
were made for the similes instead of being the creat- 
ing of a wave that heightens as it rolls. This is an- 
alogous to the costume objection, and springs perhaps 
from the same cause — the making of poetry with 
malice prepense. However, I am not going to forget 
the lovely things that Tennyson has written, and 1 
think they give him rather hard measure now. How- 
ever, it is the natural recoil of a too rapid fame. 
Wordsworth had the true kind — an unpopularity that 
roused and stimulated while he was strong enough 
to despise it, and honour, obedience, troops of friends, 
when the grasshopper would have been a burthen to 
the drooping shoulders. Tennyson, to be sure, has 
been childishly petulant ; but what have these whip- 
per-snappers who cry 'Go up, baldhead,' done that 
can be named with some things of his ? He has 
been the greatest artist in words we have had 
since Gray — and remember how Gray holds his 
own with little fuel but real fire. He had the 
secret of the inconsumable oil, and so, I fancy, 
|has Tennyson."^ 

^ Letters of James Russell Lowell. 



192 ^Cennpaon* 

The allegorical significance of the Idylls is suffi- 
ciently indicated in the lines to the Queen : 

** accept this old imperfect tale, 



New-old, and shadowing Sense at war with Soul 
Rather than that gray king, whose name, a ghost. 
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak. 
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him 
Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's/' 

This makes of Arthur a symbol, but includes no more 
specific interpretations, as that the Round Table typi- 
fies the Body, the three Queens, Faith, Hope, and 
Charity, and so on. It was an afterthought to dedi- 
cate the Idylls to the Prince Consort, and a very 
Tennysonian thought to liken their blameless hero to 
Albert. It was done with the utmost sincerity of 
feeling, and without the slightest suggestion of syco- 
phancy ; but it gave unlimited opportunity to the 
scoffers, who hailed joyfully the title invented by 
Mr. Swinburne, of ''Morte d'Albert, or Idylls of the 
Prince Consort " ; and who failed to perceive with 
him the ''exquisite magnificence of style," and the 
''splendid flashes of episodical illumination with 
which the poems are vivified or adorned." 




CHAPTER X. 
^^ ENOCH ARDEN," ANDTHE DIALECT POEMS. 

ALMOST every artist whose days have been 
long, has had at least a single day of sim- 
plicity. If he has valued cataracts and preci- 
pices in his choice of material, we may look among 
his sketches for a haying scene ; if he has been in 
huniour for psychological novels, we shall come upon 
a nursery story ; if he has composed a symphony, 
there is ballad music somewhere among his loose 
sheets ; if he has made an epic, he will devise a 
pastoral. 

It is not surprising to find that in Tennyson's good 
year of 1864 he followed the stately pageant of 
Arthur's court with the story of a fisherman. Enoch 
Arden, in comparison with Maud or In Memoriam, 
was certainly simple. The poet had stripped his style 
of its jewels and ornaments, and had striven, we learn 
from the Memoir, to use only similes '' such as might 
have been used by simple fisher-folk." He had ab- 
jured all perplexing speculation as well, and had re- 
frained from indulging in scientific suggestions, he 
had even let the superstition of the uneducated slip 



194 zrenni?9on» 

into his lines, and had not made his heroine more 
beautiful than the usual belle of a little fishing vil- 
lage. All this had he done when Mr. Walter Bage- 
hot arose and selected Enoch Arden to illustrate his 
theory of the ornate in poetry ! The story is simple 
enough, he says: '' A sailor who sells fish, breaks his 
leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes to sea, is 
wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, 
on his return finds his wife married to a miller, speaks 
to a landlady on the subject, and dies. Told in the 
pure and simple, the unadorned and classical style, 
this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr. 
Tennyson has been able to make it the principal, the 
largest, tale in his new volume. He has done so only 
by giving to every event and incident in the volume 
an accompanying commentary." 

When other critics were busy pointing out either 
that the poem was immoral because Annie married 
Philip before Enoch was really dead, or that it was 
exceptionally pure in its delineation of self-forgetful- 
ness and self-sacrifice, or that it was intensely natural 
and plain and "Saxon" in its treatment, or that it 
showed a perfect understanding of the feelings of 
sailors and the wives of sailors, Mr. Bagehot was 
saying that Mr. Tennyson had given us ''a sailor 
crowded all over with ornament and illustration, be- 
cause he then wanted to describe an unreal type of 
fancied men, — not sailors as they are, but sailors as 
they might be wished." Fish, he said, might be 
''Ocean-spoil in ocean-smelling osier," but fisher- 



u 



j£r\och Hrben/' an^ tbe ©lalect poeme* 195 



men are apt to be rather coarse and not charming at 
all. So it was necessary to ornament Enoch and 
make him the sort of man a cultivated person would 
choose to be if he were obliged to transmigrate into 
a fisherman. 

The beauties of nature, said Mr. Bagehot, would 
not have occupied the real Enoch so much as they 
occupied Mr. Tennyson in thinking about tropical 
scenery. ' ' He would have known little of the scarlet 
shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvu- 
luses. As in Robinson Crusoe, his own petty con- 
trivances and his small ailments would have been 
the principal subject to him. ' For three years,' he 
might have said, ' my back was bad ; and then I put 
two pegs into a piece of driftwood and so made a 
chair ; and after that it pleased God to send me a 
chill.' In real life his piety would scarcely have gone 
beyond that." But Tennyson was quite justified, 
according to Mr. Bagehot's theory, in ornamenting 
Enoch and his surroundings. ''The essence of pure 
art," he says, " consists in describing what is as it is, 
and this is very well for what can bear it, but there 
are many inferior things which will not bear it, and 
which nevertheless ought to be described in books." 
And a fisherman selling his wares in a small village 
is an inferior thing. 

This, of course, is only a partial estimate of Enoch 
Arden. What probably struck Tennyson when 
Woolner told him the plot, and what certainly strikes 
the reader of the poem, is the act of self-denial by 



196 XTennpeon^ 

which Enoch leaves Annie to her happiness with 
Philip when he might have claimed his own again 
to everyone's infinite disturbance. This was not an 
''inferior" subject, and it might have gained by a 
rendering as simple as the Robinson Crusoe style. 
Tennyson certainly made a tremendous effort toward 
this very simplicity, although he did not attain it, 
and his readers, comparing him to himself, for the 
most part found him what he had tried to be. He 
was not, as Mr. Gladstone once said, so well adapted 
to turning the moor into the field as to turning the 
field into the garden, but at least he made oi Enoch 
Arden a beach garden, flourishing nasturtiums and 
eglantine in place of the double rose and the dahlia. 
A writer in the contemporaneous Atlantic spoke 
of the witness the new poem bore to the poet's old 
"faculty of penetrating to the inmost significance 
both of words and of things, so that there is no waste 
and so that single words in single sentences stamp 
on the brain the substance of long experiences." 
Take this, he says : 

" Another hand crept, too, across his trade, 
Taking her bread and theirs," 

and find the '' one word crowded with pathos, telling 
of the weary loss of livelihood, the burden slowly 
growing more intolerably irksome to the bold and 
careful worker wrestling with pain, and to the fragile 
mother of the new-born babe. " And the same writer 



*'jenocb Hrben/' anb tbe Dialect ipoema. 197 

sums up his impression in the following enthusiastic 
passage : 

'' A pure manhood among the poets, a heart sim- 
ple as the simplest, an imperial fancy, whose lofty 
supremacy none can question, a high faith, and a 
spirit possessed with the sublimest and most univer- 
sal of Christ's truths, a tender and strong humanity, 
not bounded by a vague and misty sentiment, but 
pervading life in all its forms, and with these great 
skill and patience and beauty in expression, — these 
are the riper qualities to which Enoch Arden tes- 
tifies." 

Whether Enoch Arden represented to its coun- 
trymen ornateness or simplicity, ethics or drama, to 
foreigners it represented a typical phase' of English 
literature, and has been put down as the essentially 
English poem of Tennyson's collection. For one 
thing it is a sea-poem, and this in itself separates 
it from the inland inspiration of Germany and France. 
Then also Enoch, the hero, is acquainted with the 
English watchword, Duty, and embodies the national 
ideal of self-control and loyalty. Stopford Brooke 
has put this notion into admirable words : 

" Enoch," he says, "' is the type of the ' able sea- 
man ' of England, nourished in the fishing-smack, and 
then passing from land to land through the wonders 
of the waves in the merchant-vessel ; and then, when 
wars arise, the mainstay of our navies — a type which 
has lasted more than a thousand years. Arden's god- 
fearingness is not uncommon in English seamen, but 



198 ^enn?6on» 

his slow-established sense of duty is common ; and 
so are also his sturdy endurance, his settled self- 
sacrifice for those ideas that his soul approves, his 
courage unconscious of itself, his silent love of his 
country — a careful, loving, and faithful picture, for 
which we have to honour the poet. Nowhere has 
he shown more convincingly the noblest side of his 
patriotism." 

From his home at Farringford, Tennyson had con- 
stant opportunity for observation of the sea. He 
watched it 'Mazy-plunging " under the wide sky, he 
heard ' ' the league-long roller thundering on the reef, " 
and the ''hollow ocean-ridges roaring into cata- 
racts," he saw ''the wild-wave . . . green-glim- 
mering toward the summit," with "stormy crests 
that smoke against the sky," and noted the curious 
surface of the water when there came a ''wrinkled 
sea." Concerning the felicity of this last adjective, 
Stopford Brooke has given as testimony a personal 
description of his own : 

"I used to think," he says, "that the phrase 
'wrinkled sea,' in the fragment called 'The Eagle,' 
was too bold. But one day I stood on the edge of 
the cliff below Slieve League in Donegal. The cliff 
from which I looked down on the Atlantic was nine 
hundred feet in height. Beside me the giant slope 
of Slieve League plunged down from its summit for 
more than eighteen hundred feet. As I gazed down 
on the sea below, which was calm in the shelter, for 
the wind blew off the land, the varying puffs that 



u 



jEnocb Hrben/' anb tbe Bialect poema* 199 



eddied in and out among the hollows and juttings of 
the cliffs covered the quiet surface with an infinite 
network of involved ripples. It was exactly Tenny- 
son's wrinkled sea. Then, by huge good fortune, an 
eagle which built on one of the ledges of Slieve 
League flew out of his eyrie and poised, barking, on 
his wings ; but in a moment fell precipitate, as their 
manner is, straight down a thousand feet to the sea. 
And I could not help crying out : 

* The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls ; 
He watches from his mountain walls, 
And like a thunderbolt he falls.' " 

Tennyson's sea, however, is his picture-gallery, 
not his friend or his enemy. There is to be found in 
his poetry no reference that indicates personal con- 
flict with the powers of the ocean. There is no pas- 
sage that reveals the familiarity of the sailor with the 
element he battles against, such as the passage in 
Kipling's Miracles : 

** uprose the deep, by gale on gale. 

To bid me change my mind again — 
He broke his teeth along my rail, 
And, roaring, swung behind again." 

Yet, in his letter to Dawson, Tennyson says that a 
simile almost identical with Kipling's was suggested 
to him by an old fish-wife who had lost two sons at 
sea. She clenched her fist ''at the advancing tide on 
a stormy day," and cried out : " Ay ! roar, do ! how 
I hates to see thee show thy white teeth." 

The most interesting poem in the little volume to 



200 ^enn^eon* 

which Enoch Arden gave a name is '' The Northern 
Farmer, Old Style." Here, at all events, we get sim- 
plicity primeval. In fact, Tennyson, in striking this 
rustic note, seemed to awaken a new set of faculties 
within himself. Where he had been elaborately re- 
fined he became ruggedly plain-spoken ; where he 
had been mildly humourous, to concede the most, 
he became irresistibly so ; where he had picked and 
chosen the sweetest fruits of language, he pulled up 
the tubers of the Lincolnshire dialect and let them go 
into his lines smelling freshly of the soil, it was per- 
haps a whim with him, certainly not the settled 
tendency of his mind ; but the result was a little 
masterpiece. In order to realise just what the poem 
means, especially in America where Hosea Biglow 
has set the rustic type for us, it is necessary to get 
some idea of the class to which Tennyson's farmer 
belongs. The Westminster Review, in 1891, gave a 
brief account of it, from which the following extract 
is taken : 

" These farmers were almost the last of their race. 
Their portraits at first sight appear to be lugubrious 
caricatures. Their ignorance appears so colossal as 
to be incredible. It must be borne in mind, how- 
ever, that in their virtues, in their failings, in their 
mode of life and manners, and even in their speech, 
they differed very little from the time when their 
forefathers, with native grace, submitted to the yoke 
of the conquering Normans. Through changes — dy- 
nastic, religious, or social — they remained unchanged. 



**£nocb Hrben/' ant) tbe Winlcct pocwxB. 201 

The nearest market-town formed the utmost limits to 
their travels.' 

''The farm labourer was equally conservative. 
His ideas were almost as luminous as those of his 
typical ancestor, ' Gurth, the son of Beowulf, the born 
thrall of Cedric of Rotherwood.' Not that he ac- 
knowledged himself the ' thrall ' of anybody. It was 
an article of his creed that ' Britons never, never, 
never shall be slaves.' His most treasured posses- 
sion, after that of his knowledge of men and things, 
was that of his independence. He never dreamed of 
leaving his native village, and his ideas were as cir- 
cumscribed as his locality. Though by nature gifted 
with splendid stubbornness, he yielded unquestion- 
ing obedience to the farmer. When work permitted 
he attended church on Sunday, and snored through 
the service in his humble free seat with as much 
devotion as the farmer in his high-backed pew. His 
humour was of the ruminating and ponderous kind, 
and manifested itself on occasion in a solemn horse- 
play. When opportunity occurred he proved him- 
self a mighty man at the tankard or trencher ; these 
were moments of supreme bliss. In an animal way 
he was happy. He had no ambition and therefore 
no discontent. Though he sometimes grumbled, 
and pretty loudly too, he nevertheless believed his 
condition to be unalterable. The agitator had not 



^ This should not surprise us, as we still have farmers in Long Island who have 
never been to Brooklyn or to New York^ and who consider that to marry anyone 
" from away " is very poor policy and worse taste. 



202 zrenn^eon^ 

discovered him. Joseph Arch was as yet unborn, 
and Tom Mann had not preached the new crusade 
of labour. 

'' Yet these farmers and labourers whom Tennyson 
chatted with in Somersby fifty years ago were the 
witnesses of the beginning of a revolution in the 
state of English agriculture whose consequences no 
man then was able to foresee, which many, even 
now, fail to appreciate. The system of large farms 
was coming into vogue. They were destined to 
absorb all the small holdings, and to drive the sturdy 
yeomanry, who for generations had managed them 
with credit and success, into the new rising manu- 
facturing centres to eke out a miserable existence. 
The craze for large farms infected the old Lincolnshire 
farmer : 

* Feyther run up to the farm, an' I runs up to the mill 
An' I 'II run up to the brig.' 

The ruling passion was the acquisition of ' proputty ' 
by the consolidation of neighbouring small holdings 
into his large farm. The new system introduced 
new dangers. One man in every three was, as it 
developed, thrown out of employment. Thus ren- 
dered arbitrarily idle, the unemployed left their vil- 
lage, and flocked to the large towns. Hence the 
overcrowding and overcompetition, with their re- 
sultant complications of social and moral evil. 

'' Before he left home, Tennyson saw the begin- 
ning of these changes. He is one of the few living 



''j£nocb ar5en/' an& tbe 2)ialcct poeme* 203 

Lincolnshire men who saw the now obsolete opera- 
tions of sowing broadcast and dibbling beans. He 
would remember thrashing with the flail — which 
gave occupation to many men through the winter — 
being superseded by the horse-machine, and the re- 
sentment which the innovation aroused. The Lin- 
colnshire farm labourers awoke as from sleep. Their 
hatred rose to frenzy. They resorted to violence. 
Machines were destroyed. The lives of their owners 
were threatened. For a while terror and confusion 
reigned. The red fires of incendiarism lit the mid- 
night sky. Farmers became afraid. The machines 
were guarded by night and day. The blind power 
of ignorance made itself felt. At first the law seemed 
powerless. The lame and toothless parish con- 
stables were either unable or unwilling to arrest the 
ringleaders. Ultimately, two farm labourers, aged 
respectively twenty-two and twenty-four, were cap- 
tured, not far from Tennyson's home, tried at the 
Lincoln summer assizes in 183 1, and sentenced to 
death. Both were executed. 

''The agitation subsided. It broke out again in 
1848, with the introduction of the steam thrashing 
machine. Even the 'Farmer, old style,' who had 
stood firmly for the first machine, resented this 
innovation : 

* A kittle 0' steam 
Huzzin' an' maazin' the blessed fealds wi' the Divil's oan team.* 

*'The opposition, however, soon died down. 



204 zrenn?0on* 

' The old order ' had changed. The tide of rural 
migration was now flowing merrily into the towns. 
Small holdings were fast becoming a rarity, and large 
farms with a minimum of labour, the rule. 

''As we have already observed, the race of men 
from whom Tennyson drew the type of the old-style 
farmer is extinct. 'Nature brings not back the mas- 
todon.' This type can never again recur." 

It would be interesting to compare Lowell's Jona- 
than with this old Lincolnshire John. One virtue, at 
least, they would have in common — their over- 
whelming self-complacency ; keen, assertive, intel- 
ligent in Jonathan, lumbering, dull, and ignorant in 
John. Jonathan is a satirist with all the power of 
exquisite irony that lurks beneath the "Yankee" 
countenance and bites in the anecdote that Lowell 
tells of Captain Hall and the countryman : ^ 

"The Captain was walking up and down the 
veranda of a country tavern in Massachusetts while 
the coach changed horses. A thunder-storm was 
going on, and with that pleasant European air of 
indirect self-compliment in condescending to be sur- 
prised by American merit which we find so con- 
ciliating, he said to a countryman lounging against 
the door, 'Pretty heavy thunder you have here.' 
The other, who had divined at a glance his feeling of 
generous concession to a new country, drawled 
gravely, ' Waal, we dii, considerin' the number of 
inhabitants.' " For Lowell this stood as the type of 

^ Introduction to The Biglow Tapers, Second Series. 



''JBnocl) Hrben/' anb tbe Dialect poema* 205 

''Yankee" humour and so it may stand for us. 
Place it against the slow, weighty cogitation of the 
Northern Farmer, when Parson says ''easy an' freea " : 

*' * The amoighty 's a taakin o' you to 'issen, my friend,' 

says 'ea. 
I weant saay men be loiars, thaw summun said it in 'aaste : 
But 'e reads wonn sarmin a weeak, an' I 'a stubb'd Thurnaby 

waaste." 

Contrast also the somewhat partisan reverence which 
Jonathan shows for his own God, with the solemn 
irreverence of the dying farmer who criticises his 
Maker for His poor management : 

" A mowt 'a taaen owd Joanes, as 'ant not a 'aapoth o' sense, 
Or a mowt 'a taaen young Robins — a niver mended a fence : 
But godamoighty a moost taake mea an taake ma now 
Wi' aaf the cows to cauve an' Thurnaby hoiilmes to plow ! " 

The contemptuous remarks of Concord Bridge to 
" The Moniment " sound as if spoken in answer : 

*' I ha'n't no patience with sech swellin' fellers ez 
Think God can't forge 'thout them to blow the bellerses." 

Yet Tennyson's farmer is a long way from deserving 
utter scorn. He has been a thorough and persistent 
worker, and has worked for the very love of work- 
ing ; a quality already sufficiently rare, and falling 
suspiciously into disrepute. He has also realised 
a purpose : 

" Dubbut loook at the waaste : theer warn't not feead for a 
cow ; 
Nowt at all but bracken an' fuzz, an' loook at it now — 
Warn't worth nowt a haacre, an' now theer 's lots o' feead, 
Fourscoor yows upon it an' some on it down i' seead." 



2o6 Itenni^aon* 

And whatever his private morals have been, — they 
evidently have borne some resemblance to those of 
his Viking ancestors, — he has been cordially faithful 
to his trust and to his ''Squoire," and is really 
troubled by the necessity of dying at a moment so 
inconvenient : 

'* Do godamoighty know what a 's doing a-taakin' o' mea? 
I beant won as sows 'ere a bean an' yonder a pea ; 
An' Squoire 'ull be sa mad an' all — a' dear a' dear ! 
And I 'a managed for Squoire coom Michaelmas thutty year." 

In spite of his low estate and his pebbly dialect the 
poor old hard-working heathen makes an appeal to 
the admiration he so lavishly spent upon himself, and 
will live, it is easy to imagine, to be the joy and the 
despair of future glossologists. 

''The Northern Farmer, New Style," is the natu- 
ral sequel to the old-style farmer. From the human 
point of view he is no improvement ; greed has en- 
tered into his soul and has made it a very destestable 
abiding place for such virtues as he possesses. He is 
arguing after the fashion of the immortal Weller with 
his son, on the question of marriage : ^^ 

4 

** Me an' thy muther, Sammy, 'as bean a-talkin' o' thee ; w 

Thou 's bean talkin' to muther, an' she bean a tellin it me. 
Thou '11 not marry for munny — thou 's sweet upo' parson's 

lass — 
Noa — thou '11 marry for luvv — an' we boath on us thinks tha an 

ass." 

*'Proputty, proputty, proputty," is the refrain, 
^'ijroputty sticks," and ''proputty grows," and 



44 



jBnocl) Hr^en/' anb tbe 2)ialect poeme- 207 



property alone is worthy of respect. He partially 
understands the sentiment of his son toward ''par- 
son's lass," for wasn't he ''crazed fur the lasses" 
himself when he was a lad ? But he 

knaw'd a Quaaker feller as often 'as towd ma this : 



* Doant thou marry for munny, but goa wheer munny is I "* 

He passes the advice on to his son with the very 
astute reflection : 



" Taake my word for it, Sammy, the poor in a loomp is bad — 
Them or thir feythers, tha sees, mun 'a bean a laazy lot. 
Fur work mun 'a gone to the gittin' whiniver munny was 
got." 

With these two stubborn rustics belongs the 
' Churchwarden " whose politic philosophy is ex- 
pressed rather too openly for perfect naturalness. 
The Churchwarden has been a Dissenter " an' ageean 
the toithe an' the raate," but he found it wasn't 
the "gaainist waay to the narra Gaate " ; and 
promptly reverted to the old Church. The Dis- 
senters were so unkind as to retaliate in a pecu- 
iarly original fashion : 

" An' I can't abear 'em, I can't, fur a lot on 'em coom'd to- 

year — 
I wur down wi' the rheumatis then — to my pond to wesh 

thessens theere — 
Sa I sticks like the ivin as long as I lives to the owd Chuch 

now. 
Fur they wesh'd their sins i' my pond, an' I doubts they pois- 

on'd the cow." 



2o8 ?i;enni?0oa 

He therefore advises the curate if he wants to find 
his way to a bishopric, to preach against the sins of 
the Baptists and let the '' Quality " alone. He him- 
self had '' cottoned down to his betters," 

" An' now by the Graace o' the Lord, Mr. Harry, I ham wot 
I ham." 

Again a reviewer in the IVestminster throws a 
very clear and concentrated light upon the origin of 
''The Churchwarden and the Curate."^ He explains 
that Tennyson's turncoat from his own point of 
view was quite sensible to return to the " owd 
Chuch." There was no profit in dissent. Dissent- 
ers in remote villages were, at the time of Tenny- 
son's youth, on the losing side : ''As a rule they 
were regarded with suspicion and disfavour. They 
were few in number. For the most part, the con- 
gregations that met, either in a barn, or in some 
humble meeting-house, comprised farm-labourers 
and poor cottars struggling against fate in the silent 
decadence of their order through the gradual absorp- 
tion of small holdings by the more prosperous farm- 
ers. No Dissenter could hope to bask in the 
sunshine of squirely favour. To be one of the de- 
spised community was to proclaim one's self a sol- 
dier in the rabble army of discontents. It was a 
protest against the existing order of things — to the 
rural potentates the more irritating because of the 
immovable basis of conscience upon which it was 

* Davie's " Tennyson's Turncoat," JVestminstet Review, 1894. 



'*iBnocl) arbcn/' anb tbe Bialect poeme^ 209 

founded." This bred a race that was capable of a 
certain self-conscious nobility. *' Their religion was 
to them dearer than life. It was the pearl of great 
price, and they were resolved neither to part with it 
nor to allow its lustre to be tarnished." There were 
high souls among them, '' men possessed of that 
spiritual force which makes reformations possible 
and revolutions a terrible fact," but even these men 
were not the sort that made heaven seem attractive. 
They were proud to an extreme and ''would un- 
dergo the severest privations rather than condescend 
to accept charity," they possessed the stern virtues 
that seldom go with sweetness and light, and these 
they did not possess. 

" Overpowered with the continual sense of their 
own and their neighbour's sins, they were absorbed 
in the task of working out their own salvation with 
fear and trembling. Hence they fell into the pardon- 
able but fatal error of identifying piety with sourness 
and austerity. Thus they repelled, where they 
would have attracted, and, like many wiser men, 
failed in their hope to regenerate mankind by doses 
of spiritual vinegar. Yet they were not dismayed. 
Failure became a spur to perseverance, and, confi- 
dent in the righteousness of their cause, and the 
justice of their methods, they would have gone 
forth, filled with the missionary spirit which is in- 
separable from intense conviction, and proclaimed in 
the village inn, or at the corners of the streets, the 
glad tidings that had turned the current of their 



I 



2IO zrenn^eon. 

thoughts to higher things. But prudence forbade. 
Their security of tenure was too precarious to admit 
of apostolic enterprise. To be turned adrift was to 
become a pauper, for who would employ a fiery and 
pestilent schismatic ? Their zeal, therefore, was per- 
force concentrated within narrow bounds. And it 
is, perhaps, the intensity born of the narrowness of 
these early Dissenters' views, that has kept afire the 
zeal which has developed into that social force whose 
manifestations are even now becoming notable and 
historic. The miserable condition of the rural popu- 
lation necessarily made those who had the mis- 
fortune to entertain intense political or religious 
convictions, prudent. Their life appeared a dull 
round of almost unredeemed hopelessness. Wages 
were barely sufficient to stave off starvation. Many 
of their homes, amid the most unsanitary surround- 
ings, were, however picturesque to the casual visitor, 
little better than rough thatched hovels. Accommo- 
dation was meagre in the extreme. By a perverse 
provision of British nature, poverty and prolific fami- 
lies were inseparable. The hopeless and half-starved 
Lincolnshire labourer generally contrived to be blessed 
with an army of children. For sleeping-room, they 
were straitened to the tensest strain of poor morality's 
frail tenter-hooks. Education was undreamed of 
As soon as a boy could walk he was set to help 
maintain himself. He was born to ignorance and 
toil as the sparks fly upward." Looking first on this 
picture and then upon that other of the Churchwar- 



**£nocb Hr&en/' anb tbe ©lalect Ipoeme* 211 

den returned to the fold, a favourite with '' Quality," 
and in the way of temporal, if not of eternal advance- 
ment, it is easy to understand the appeal made to a 
flexible conscience by the estate of the latter. 

Tennyson continued, at intervals, to write these 
dialect poems, and if they were gathered together in 
one volume, as they never have been, they would 
give a certain value and proportion to a side of Ten- 
nyson's genius that is usually neglected. They show 
that when he took a type of character with which 
he was thoroughly familiar he could lose himself in 
the representation. His great danger in his dramas 
and monodramas and dramatic conceptions lay in his 
tendency to read himself into every human being he 
drew. Without too far pushing a general character- 
isation, we find him insular again. It was very diffi- 
cult for him to see things from different points of 
view, as they would be seen by people unlike him- 
self. If one of his characters was high-minded, as 
Enoch Arden was, or King Arthur, or a Becket, he 
was apt to be high-minded in a very Tennyson- 
ian way. But these Lincolnshire people he knew 
too well to entertain any notion of their sharing his 
feelings or ways of expression. Their characteristics 
were so strongly marked that there was no evading 
them, and when Tennyson accepted them as material 
he seems to have let himself go in the sheer pleasure 
of interpretation, without any purifying, or refining, 
or idealising effort. The result stirs one's fancy to 
dreaming what would have happened if Tennyson 



212 



ZTenn^aon. 



had been thrust out of his natural orbit into the stir 
and press of active life among hard-headed realists, 
in poverty-stricken communities. A poem like "The 
Northern Cobbler " indicates the power to grasp the 
'' immanent life of things " that, according to Lowell, 
makes a new poet ; the power of struggling through 
conventions and convictions to elemental reality as it 
is shown, not only in beauty and holiness, but in 
discomfort and pain and ugliness, in vulgarity and 
immorality. 




CHAPTER XI. 
THE DRAMAS. 

WHEN Tennyson, at sixty-five, decided to 
enter the field of drama it was naturally 
a surprise to his readers. In his previous 
work there had been little sign of the dramatic qual- 
ity. Maud was not undramatic in a certain sense of 
the word ; but no one seems to have been so mad as 
to think of it in connection with the stage. And one 
of its reviewers spoke of the story in it — the plot — 
as so vague and so confused that a friend of his had 
risen from the reading, uncertain whether the heroine 
was dead or alive. Action, the living soul of drama, 
was conspicuously absent from the narrative poems, 
even in the metaphysical sense given to the term by 
Ibsen and Maeterlinck. Events followed one another 
with deliberation, and so did mental phases. 

In the review by Mr. Henry James we find the 
perfect statement of this characteristic.^ '' With the 
poets who are natural chroniclers of movement," he 
says, "the words fall into their places as with some 
throw of the dice, which fortune should always 

' The Galaxy, September, 1875. 
213 



214 zrenn?6om 

favour. With Scott and Byron they leap into the 
verse a pieds joints, and shake it with their coming ; 
with Tennyson they arrive slowly aud settle cau- 
tiously into their attitudes, after having well scanned 
the locality. In consequence they are generally ex- 
quisite, and make exquisite combinations ; but the 
result is intellectual poetry and not passionate — poetry 
which, if the term is not too pedantic, one may qual- 
ify as static poetry. Any scene of violence repre- 
sented by Tennyson is always singularly limited and 
compressed ; it is reduced to a few elements — refined 
to a single statuesque episode. There are, for exam- 
ple, several descriptions of tournaments and combats 
in the Idylls of the King, They are all most beauti- 
ful, but they are all curiously delicate. One gets no 
sense of the din and shock of battle ; one seems to 
be looking at a bas-relief of two contesting knights 
in chiselled silver on a priceless piece of plate." 

It was then to be expected that in Tennyson's 
dramas we should miss the din and shock of life within 
and without. His customary mode of treatment when 
confronted by a violent action is shown in Aylmer's 
Field, where Sir Aylmer ''with a sudden execration 
drove the footstool from before him and arose." 
None of Shakespeare's angry people ever kicked a foot- 
stool thus. Moreover, as Mr. James goes on to show, 
Queen Mary, the first of Tennyson's dramas in order 
of production, is not an edifice ; its author lacked 
the architectonic faculty ; there seems no adequate 
structure to bind together the incidents, and the inci- 



Zbe Dramas. 215 

dents themselves are chosen rather to bring out the 
pathos of Mary's private position than to impress 
upon the reader or spectator the march of public 
events. Tennyson builded his house upon Froude 
and the character of the Queen is that presented by 
Froude ^ : 

" No English Sovereign ever ascended the throne 
with larger popularity than Mary Tudor. The coun- 
try was eager to atone to her for her mother's injuries, 
and the instinctive loyalty of the English towards 
their natural Sovereign was enhanced by the abortive 
efforts of Northumberland to rob her of her inherit- 
ance. She had reigned little more than five years, 
and she descended into the grave amid curses deeper 
than the acclamations which had welcomed her ac- 
cession. In that brief time she had swathed her 
name in the horrid epithet which will cling to it for- 
ever, and yet from the passions which in general 
tempt men into crime she was entirely free ; to the 
time of her accession she had lived a blameless and 
in many respects a noble life, and few men or women 
have lived less capable of doing knowingly a wrong 
thing." ^ A writer in the Quarterly Review contrasts 
this picture of Mary with Hume's very different judg- 
ment, which is given as follows : 

'Mt is not necessary to employ many words in 
drawing the character of this Princess. She pos- 



* I do not, of course, mean to imply that Tennyson read only Froude in prepara- 
tion. The Memoir gives a considerable list of books that served him. 

* Froude's History of England. 



2i6 ?[;enni?0om 

sessed few qualities either estimable or amiable, and 
her person was as little engaging as her behaviour 
and address. Obstinacy, bigotry, violence, cruelty, 
malignity, revenge, tyranny, every circumstance of 
her character took a tincture from her bad temper and 
narrow understanding. And amidst that complica- 
tion of vices which entered into her composition, we 
shall scarcely find any virtue but that of sincerity, 
which she seems to have maintained throughout her 
whole life, except in the beginning of her reign, when 
the necessity of her affairs obliged her to make some 
promises which she never intended to perform. She 
appears also, as well as her father, to have been sus- 
ceptible of some attachments of friendship and that 
without the caprice or inconsistency which were so 
remarkable in the conduct of that monarch. To 
which we may add, that in many circumstances of 
her life she gave indications of resolution and vigour 
of mind which seem to have been inherent in her 
family." 

The Quarterly reviewer remarks that this delinea- 
tion " does not promise a character suited to the hero- 
ine of a romantic drama," and also that Tennyson, 
choosing the opposite character, produced a drama, the 
motive of which is purely feminine : '' Our attention 
is drawn off," he says, ''from those public actions 
which have branded Mary's name with its execrable 
epithet, and pity and compassion are aroused on her 
behalf, for the terrible situation in which she is placed, 
for the suffering and loving wife, for the downfall of 







The Very Reverend Dean Bradley, 

Front li/e. 



Zbc Bramae^ 217 

the hopes of the enthusiastic and aspiring Catholic, 
as though it were expected that we were to waive 
our judgment on the Queen out of our sympathy 
with the woman. Thus the dignity of history is 
lowered for the sake of imagination and sentiment. 
Who would ever recognise in the passionate wife, 
whose nerves are always on the edge, in the pitiful 
and sentimental woman shrinking from the execution 
of Lady Jane Grey, in the hysterical mother-expectant, 
the dull, vindictive, and narrow-minded Princess de- 
scribed in the sober pages of Hume ? " 

The same reviewer sums up an acute analysis of 
the play with the admission that it is probably the 
best specimen of literary drama of the time : " It is 
at least admirable in form," he says; ''it is better 
than Mr. Browning's dramatic studies, which have 
no form at all. It is better than the Spanish Gypsy, 
which has a hybrid form. It is better than Bothwell, 
as it has more backbone, and less of the enormous 
volume and verbosity, which, we think, would al- 
ways prevent Mr. Swinburne from achieving suc- 
cess as a dramatist. Of the dramatic spirit, in the 
Shakespearian sense, the play, as we have said, has 
nothing." 

Tennyson seems to have shared Goethe's idea of 
elevating the public, instead of amusing it, through 
the drama. We learn from the Memoir that ''he 
believed in the future of our modern English stage 
when education should have made the masses more 
literary." This, perhaps, accounts for the tinge of 



2i8 ^enni?0om 

grandiosity, the slightly supercilious and pedantic air 
of Queen Mary, in which the masses are being some- 
what too obviously educated, and the poet's personal 
view of Mary's character is pushed to the point of 
dulness. The varied elements of the great popular 
plays are reduced to one motive — the idealisation, 
or, as Tennyson doubtless thought, the humanisa- 
tion of Mary, and this partisanship is undertaken 
with so little subtlety, that the reader finds it diffi- 
cult to keep up a very lively interest in his own con- 
version. 

It should be noted that critics of authority have 
waxed enthusiastic over Tennyson's plays : Sped- 
ding admired them, George Eliot said ''they run 
Shakespeare's close," Lewes agreed with her. Brown- 
ing was unable to see "the shade of a fault" in 
Queen Mary, Irving thought Becket a finer play than 
King John, and Richard Hutton was convinced that 
Queen Mary would compare '' with something more 
than advantage " with Shakespeare's Henry VIII , 

'' Of course," the latter critic says, ''that is by no 
means the finest even of the historical plays of Shake- 
speare, nor is it probably wholly his own, — and 1 
only mention it because it, too, contains a study of 
the good and of the evil qualities of the Tudor char- 
acter, — but then no play of any modern poet would 
be likely to rank with any of the greater plays of 
Shakespeare. Certainly 1 should be surprised to hear 
that any true critic would rate Queen Mary, whether 
in dramatic force or in general power, below Henry 



ZTbe Dramaa^ 219 

VIIL, and my own impression is that it is a decidedly 
finer work of dramatic art. The morbid passions of 
Mary, the brief intervals of her lucid and energetic 
action, the gloom of her physical decay, and the de- 
spair of her moral desolation, together make up a 
picture which it would be impossible for anyone 
who can enter into it ever to forget." Were there 
critics like these in Shakespeare's day that Hamlet 
should believe ''there is nothing good or ill but 
thinking makes it so " ? In one point, at all events, 
Tennyson was not behind Shakespeare ; he was 
equally given to incorporating in his work the very 
letter of his sources, and this trait is in itself a sort 
of commentary on the difference between the two as 
dramatists. Where we find in the plays of Tennyson 
spontaneity and vitality, we frequently discover that 
the essential language of the original has been bodily 
transferred by him. With Shakespeare, on the con- 
trary, the passages he decides to appropriate are 
usually overshadowed by the richness and variety 
of his own fancy. 

Let us take, for example, the scene of Cranmer's 
martyrdom in Queen Mary. If we turn to the ac- 
count in Froude we shall find that Tennyson leaves 
Cranmer's passionate appeal as nearly as possible 
alone, and the blank verse rendering demanded 
singularly few changes. This is the prose version 
as it is given in Froude's History : 

" 'O Father of heaven,' he prayed, * O Son of God, Redeemer 
of the world ; O Holy Ghost, three Persons and one God, have 



M^ 



2 20 ZTenn^eom 

mercy upon me, most wretched caitiff and miserable sinner. I 
have offended both heaven and earth more than my tongue can 
express ; whither then may I go, or whither should I flee for 
succour ? To heaven 1 am ashamed to lift up mine eyes, and in 
earth I find no succour nor refuge. What shall I do ? Shall I de- 
spair ? God forbid ! Oh, good God, thou art merciful, and re- 
fusest none that come to thee for succour. To thee, therefore, do 
I come ; to thee do I humble myself, saying, O Lord, my sins be 
great, yet have mercy on me for thy great mercy. The mystery 
was not wrought that God became man, for few or little offences. 
Thou didst not give thy Son, O Father, for small sins only, but 
for all and the greatest in the world, so that the sinner return to 
thee with a penitent heart, as I do at this present. Wherefore 
have mercy upon me, O Lord, whose property is always to have 
mercy ; although my sins be great, yet is thy mercy greater ; 
wherefore have mercy upon me, O Lord, for thy great mercy. 
I crave nothing, O Lord, for mine own merits, but for thy 
Name's sake, and, therefore, O Father of heaven, hallowed 
be thy Name.' 

"Then rising, he went on with his address : 
" * Every man desireth, good people, at the time of his death, 
to give some good exhortation that others may remember after 
his death, and be the better thereby ; for one word spoken of a 
man at his last end will be more remembered than the sermons 
made of them that live and remain.' " 

And this is Tennyson's adaptation : 

" O God, Father of Heaven ! 



O Son of God, Redeemer of the world ! 

Holy Ghost ! proceeding from them both, 
Three persons and one God, have mercy on me, 
Most miserable sinner, wretched man. 

1 have offended against heaven and earth 
More grievously than any tongue can tell. 
Then whither should I flee for any help ? 
I am ashamed to lift my eyes to heaven, 
And I can find no refuge upon earth. 
Shall I despair then ? — God forbid ! O God, 
For thou art merciful, refusing none 



ZTbe 3)rama0* 221 

That come to thee for succour; unto thee, 

Therefore, I come ; humble myself to thee ; 

Saying, O Lord God, although my sins be great, 

For thy great mercy have mercy ! O God the Son, 

Not for slight faults alone, when thou becamest 

Man in the Flesh, was the great mystery wrought ; 

O God the Father, not for little sins 

Didst thou yield up thy Son to human death ; 

But for the greatest sin that can be sinn'd, 

Yea even such as mine, incalculable. 

Unpardonable, — sin against the light. 

The truth of God which I had proven and known. 

Thy mercy must be greater than all sin. 

Forgive me. Father, for no merit of mine, 

But that thy name by man be glorified, 

And thy most blessed Son's who died for m.an. 

Good people, every man at time of death 

Would fain set forth some saying that may live 

After his death and better humankind ; 

For death gives life's last word a power to live, 

And like the stone-cut epitaph remain 

After the vanish'd voice and speak to men. 

God grant me grace to glorify my God." 

This passage, even with its alliterative ending, 
seems to us finer than the more Tennysonian pas- 
sages which were most admired by Mr. Hutton ; and 
even of these, the parts that are closest to the origi- 
nal seem most significant and valuable, while with 
Shakespeare it is just the other way ; the more flesh 
he puts on his skeleton, the more he ornaments and 
adorns the fundamental idea, the more he compels 
the admiration of his students. In the speech of 
the dying Gaunt, which possibly was founded, Mr. 
Froude suggests, upon a part of Cranmer's, what a 
circling flight is taken about the plain text : 



I , 



222 ^enn?6on^ 

" O, but they say, the tongues of dying men 
Enforce attention, like deep harmony : 
Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain : 
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain. 
He, that no more must say, is listened more 
Than they whom youth and ease have taught to gloze ; 
More are men's ends marked, than their lives before ; 
The setting sun, and music at the close, 
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last ; 
Writ in remembrance more than things long past." 

And when, as in the Duke of Norfolk's speeches, 
metaphor is heaped up like driftwood on a fire, ap- 
parently for the pure love of multi-coloured flame, 
the thought, the idea, is not, we find, retarded or 
tangled as in many of Tennyson's more elaborate 
figurings, but made clearer and given more life with 
every added version ; for example : 

*' Be advis'd. 
Heat not a furnace for your foe so hot 
That it do singe yourself : we may outrun 
By violent swiftness that which we run at, 
And lose by over-running. Know you not 
The fire that mounts the liquor till 't run o'er. 
In seeming to augment it wastes it? Be advised." 

Without dealing further with comparisons, it may 
be said that Tennyson's first drama was at least 
dignified in conception and of consistent elevation of 
purpose, but that it lacked variety, and equally the 
austerity that sometimes makes monotony seem the 
consummate art. 

In 1876, Harold followed Queen Mary, and set 



ZTbe 2)rama0, 223 

forth ''the great conflict between Danes, Saxons, 
and Normans for supremacy, the awakening of the 
English people and clergy from the slumber into 
which they had for the most part fallen, and the 
forecast of the greatness of our composite race."' 
Tennyson was evidently stirred to the depths by 
what may be called the elemental character of his 
theme ; but he had not the plasticity of mind or 
reach of imagination to throw himself back into an 
age of alien standards and alien manners. His war- 
riors are pleasant gentlemen, but very different from 
those of Andersen's wonder-stories, who thunder 
with their knives or knucklebones on the table and 
strike on their shields, and make a tremendous noise ; 
and his Harold of the eleventh century is very much 
one of ourselves in his mental and moral sophistica- 
tion, and his reflective philosophy at critical mo- 
ments. 

Professor Jebb, in his review,^ describes the effect 
of Harold's oath, made on the bones of the Norman 
saints : 

'' It becomes his avenging destiny. In his short 
career it is what the inherited curse was to the house 
of Pelops. Harold can say in the true sense which 
Euripides meant, ' My tongue has sworn, but my 
soul has not sworn.' Nothing in the play seems 
to us finer than the contrast between Harold's own 
view of his predicament and the casuistry of the 

* Hallam Tennyson's Alfred, Lord Tennyson. 

• Times, October i8, 1876. 



224 ITennijeon, 

theologians who seek the immediate doom of the 
defiled ; but beyond that doom he looks up to that 
Justice which shall give him the reward of the pure 
in spirit." 

The history of this false oath is really the chief 
matter of the drama. Tennyson is obviously the 
partisan of Harold and of Saxon England, and all 
the dramatic necessities of battles and great public 
scenes dwindle to him, precisely as in Queen Mary, 
before the position of Harold toward his own con- 
science. In the case of the unlucky Queen, however, 
the prevailing sentiment was that of pity, while in 
Harold the proving of the hero's spiritual honour 
and essential incorruptibility becomes a national mat- 
ter, in which the typical character of Tennyson's 
countrymen is involved. Harold is too meagre 
and too bald, too much made up of scraps and 
patches, to be pronounced wholly an improvement 
on Queen Mary, and yet the swifter movement and 
the stronger conviction give it a certain access of 
vitality. 

If we pass over The Cup and The Falcon as un- 
important interruptions of the sequence of the his- 
toric trilogy, and come directly to Becket, printed in 
1879, published in 1884, and played in 1893, we no- 
tice a perceptible rising from the level of Queen Mary 
and Harold; more suggestion of tints and tones, 
greater modulation, a lighter and more intelligent 
touch — and yet it is more than ever obvious that 
Tennyson's great qualities did not lie in the direction 



ZTbe Bramae* 225 

of drama built on Shakespearian lines. In the charac- 
ter of a Becket, whether seen from the Protestant or 
from the Catholic point of view, he had a subject 
that demanded Shakespearian faculties. A man so 
emphatic, so elusive, so fit for great opportunity, so 
capable ot seeing more than one side, and apparently 
so incapable of seeing more than one side at one 
time, might well have occupied the brain that pro- 
duced Hamlet. But Shakespeare withheld his hand, 
and Tennyson appropriated the vacant space. Let 
us see how he made use of his opportunity. In the 
first place, a Becket's position in the drama is that of 
Archbishop. He is hardly visible as Chancellor, and 
the double play of worldly and ecclesiastical impulse 
is missed. In the next place, Tennyson, as might be 
expected, traces a Becket's change of action to the 
noblest motive— that of dedication to an ideal suiting 
his religious position. From this we should expect 
-with Shakespeare— a nature fully sensible of the 
dignity of the clergy, and the imperial character of 
Rome, whereas a Becket— the St. Thomas to be— 
appears to look upon Rome and the clergy very much 
as Tennyson looks upon them across the lapse of 
seven centuries. Then there is the introduction of 
Fair Rosamund, who is so much outside the true 
historical narrative and so difficult to bring in, that 
the author has faltered in his attack upon the prob- 
lem, and in place of subtly weaving the fanciful 
legend into the drama as a delicate underplay, has 
plumped it solidly down among the greater elements. 



226 ^ennijeon, 

to their infinite disturbance. And it we look at the 
whole result as a literary monument, we shall find it 
written, of course, in a cultivated, serious style, 
broken here and there by fragments of exquisite 
beauty, such as the duet at the beginning of the sec- 
ond act, and rising now and again to brief flights of 
passion, as in Rosamund's reply to Henry's question 
of what her attitude would be should a Becket ex- 
communicate him, and in her challenge to Eleanor to 
meet her before God ; but totally without the im- 
measurable pathos of King John, and without the 
most distant approach to the magnificence contribu- 
ted by Wolsey to the play of Henry J/III. in fact, 
to use a somewhat frivolous symbol, Becket suggests 
the performance of an inadequately trained acrobat, 
who crosses a rope at a dizzy height with terrifying 
uncertainty, maintaining his balance, but failing to 
dominate the minds of the spectators and carry them 
off from the danger of the situation. 

The reviews managed among them to detect all 
the faults and most of the virtues. None, perhaps, 
did complete justice to the delineation of Eleanor, in 
whom Tennyson suggests a light and reckless hu- 
mour that lifts her into the elastic element of distinc- 
tion. When she enters, singing : 

'* Over ! the sweet summer closes, 
The reign of the roses is done ; 
Over and gone with the roses, 
And over and gone with the sun — 
Here ; but our sun in Aquitaine lasts longer. I would I were in 
Aquitaine again — your North chills me. 



Zbe 2)rama0* 227 

'* Over ! the sweet summer closes, 
And never a flower at the close ; 
Over and gone with the roses, 
And winter again and the snows " — 

it is possible to realise the debonair queen and gifted 
troubadour. 

The Memoir records that Tennyson summoned 
Mr. W. G. Ward to listen to Becket in order to dis- 
cover its effect upon the Roman Catholic mind, and 
that the effect was very flattering to the author, Mr. 
Ward indulging in exclamations of delight and amaze- 
ment. In the light of this item it is interesting to 
observe the effect of the play upon the mind of a re- 
viewer in the Catholic World} Comparing it with 
Aubrey de Vere's St. Thomas of Canterbury, he says 
that the latter is the true portrait, and Tennyson's 
the unpardonably false one. 

" Aubrey de Vere's conception of the motives of 
the martyred primate," he says, "is worthy of a 
Catholic poet. Tennyson grasps only faintly the 
Christianity [Roman-Catholicism ?] of a Becket. It 
does not come home to him, it does not touch him, 
because in his experience he has never come in 
contact with the inner life of a devout priest, and 
therefore his imagination is not equal to the task of 
evolving one. Of the real meaning of asceticism, 
he is entirely ignorant." 

Again : 

'' It may be said that Tennyson's idea of St. 

* Maurice F. Egan, Catholic World, December, 1885. 



228 XCenn^eon* 

Thomas is very human, and that the poet has 
well depicted in rushing words a proud nature tow- 
ering and neither bending nor breaking. Tennyson's 
Becket is well enough painted from that point of 
view. There are some exquisitely fine natural 
touches. But the poet-laureate had no right to at- 
tempt to depict the character of St. Thomas merely 
from that point of view. Pride and enthusiasm would 
never have made a Christian martyr of Thomas a 
Becket, and it is the full understanding of this that, 
leaving out other qualities, makes Aubrey de Vere the 
greater poet and the truer delineator of a hero whom 
it is almost sacrilege to misrepresent for the sake of 
a theatrical succes d'estime.'' 

And still again, with rising choler and no little 
loss of critical dignity : 

''Tennyson, echoing, perhaps, some sectarian 
preacher, causes the pope's almoner to suggest 
treachery to the archbishop when the king is urg- 
ing him to sign the articles against the freedom of 
the church. Philip de Eleemosyna tempts the arch- 
bishop to grievous sin by whispering that the pope 
wants him to commit it : 

' Cannot the pope absolve thee if thou sign?' 

This might be forgiven in a tract against popery, on 
the score of ignorance ; but what plea can be offered 
for it in the careful overwrought work of a poet 
whose fame is world-wide and whose knowledge 
ought not to be much narrower? 



Zbc 2)rama0, 229 

^'Herbert of Bosham, the archbishop's faithful 
friend, a devout cleric and a sensible man accord- 
ing to good authorities, is made to drivel : 

' Thee, thou holy Thomas ! 
I would that thou hadst been the Holy Father/ 

To which Tennyson's archbishop complacently re- 
plies : 

* I would have done my most to keep Rome holy, 
I would have made Rome know she still is Rome— 
Who stands aghast at her eternal self 
And shakes at mortal kings— her vacillation, 
Avarice, craft— O God, how many an innocent 
Has left his bones upon the way to Rome 
Unwept, uncared for. Yea— on mine own self 
The King had had no power except for Rome. 
'T IS not the King who is guilty of mine exile, 
But Rome, Rome, Rome ! ' 

Was there ever an honest and faithful priest and 
friend so misrepresented by a poet dazzled by the 
glare of the footlights ? Was ever a saint and mar- 
tyr more besmeared with mock heroic pride and self- 
ishness ? " 

In Tennyson's dedication of Becket to the Earl of 
Selborne, he declares that the play is ^'not intended 
in its present form to meet the exigencies " of the 
modern theatre. Irving's abridgment rendered it 
possible, and, in 1893, Mr. Wedmore in the Academy 
pronounced it "one of the most distinct of the 
Lyceum successes." After an appreciative notice 
3f the players who took the minor parts, he says : 



230 ICenni26om 

"And now for the two most important of the 
performers— for Rosamund and Becket, as the inven- 
tion of Lord Tennyson has coupled them together. 
They are Miss Terry and Mr. Irving. Graceful, win- 
ning, and tender, these are the words that come to 
one most quickly to express all that Miss Ellen Terry 
is— her familiar self, in fine— in the part of Rosa- 
mund. A far greater variety than Miss Terry can 
claim belongs to Mr. Irving, in the first place, as a 
man, and in the second, because he is Mr. Irving. In 
Becket he has added another and a quite new por- 
trait to that accumulating group of subtle, vigorous, 
distinguished ecclesiastics whom, with the pencil of 
his own art, he has drawn in a fashion worthy al- 
most of Holbein. Becket is a most finished picture. 
His bravery and fidelity — faithful first to the secular 
arm, faithful then to the spiritual, — his obstinacy 
even, his occasional tenderness, his firmness, and his 
piety — all these qualities or characteristics by the 
most refined methods Mr. Irving contrives to ex- 
press. No performance of his has been more digni- 
fied, more expressive, yet more wisely restrained. 
Among his recent successes this is certainly one of 
the most conspicuous. As actor he does his large 
part toward making the play not only acceptable but 
thoroughly enjoyable. As manager he bestows upon 
it such further advantage as a piece may gain when 
the resources of the Lyceum treasury and of the 
Lyceum good taste are lavished upon its production. 
Things greater in themselves — greater as poetic pro- 




Henry Irving {as ''Becket "). 

Front life. 



Zbc Dramae* 231 

ductions— have, of course, been seen, but seldom 
anything more creditable. Seldom has somewhat 
limited literary material been applied to better effect." 

If devotion of one art to another, the contribu- 
tion of a plastic science to rather a stiff medium, 
counts at all in the way of friendship, Mr. Irving 
has obviously earned his rank among Tennyson's 
good friends. 

The Promise of May is now usually called ''that 
unfortunate play," and when it was produced the 
Saturday Review demonstrated that it was not a play 
at all. It trampled upon the prejudices of freethink- 
ers, and lifted up Lord Queensberry in his seat at the 
theatre to declare, apropos of Edgar's comments upon 
marriage : ''These are the sentiments that a profess- 
ing Christian has put into the mouth of his imaginary 
freethinker, and it is not the truth." Nevertheless, 
Tennyson nowhere else came so near writing an 
original drama. It is hardly probable that he evolved 
the plot entirely from his inner consciousness ; but 
he certainly had his own idea of the characters, and 
although they are like shapeless twigs torn from the 
living tree, there is sap in them. The farm labourers 
and Farmer Dobson have plenty of fresh colour, and 
even Edgar shows an effort toward coordination of 
impression, although his villainy is so transparent as 
almost to be ludicrous. Lowell tells us that " every 
age says to its poets, like a mistress to her lover, 
'Tell me what I am like,'" and in The Promise of 
May Tennyson seems to have made a clumsy little 



232 c;enn?0on. 

caricature of certain phases of the life he knew. It 
is grotesque, it is incredible, it is so badly worked 
out as to seem positively cheap in method, but there 
are lines of genuine resemblance ; it has an air of 
struggle toward undiscoverable truth. No actor 
could make Edgar interesting ; he is not only vulgar 
and bad, he is irremediably dull ; his mind is malari- 
ous like a stagnant pool, and the flies and insects that 
hover over it in the form of thoughts, are merely at- 
tracted to it without forming any essential part of it ; 
but in his relation with the two village girls Tenny- 
son caught a glimpse of the strangeness of human 
nature, and set it down without sentimentalism. 
And then, as he was seventy-three years old and too 
fixed in his tendencies of mind to break a new road, 
he passed on to The Foresters and the familiar legends 
of Robin Hood, to make what the Athenceum called 
a picture play. 

The figures of The Foresters are those of the old 
ballads roaming ''merry Sherwood" in a peaceable 
fashion, without the smiting off of heads, and the 
'' ferly strife " of the old ballad company. Tennyson 
here has shown in a thoroughly modern fashion how 

"■ In summer when the shaws be sheen 

And leaves be large and long, 
It is full merry in fair forest 

To hear the fowles song; 
To see the deer draw to the dale 

And leave the hilles hie 
And shadow them in the leaves green 

Under the greenwood tree." 



TLbc Dramae. 233 

Robin Hood, the hero, is also a modern version 
of him whose '' merry sportis " the '' vulgar pepyll " 
sang before the fourteenth century, but he and his 
men correspond in outward appearance to Drayton's 
description, and so does Marian. Robin 

'* to his mistress dear, his loved Marian, 



Was ever constant known, which, whereso'er she came, 
Was sovereign of the woods, chief lady of the game"; 

and Tennyson's Robin is equally constant, but he 
has a vein of Elizabethan self-consciousness which 
shows itself in such philosophy as he utters when 
he is alone in the wood : 



My lonely hour ! 



The king of day hath stept from off his throne, 

Flung by the golden mantle of the cloud, 

And sets, a naked fire. The King of England 

Perchance this day may sink as gloriously. 

Red with his own and enemy's blood — but no ! 

We hear he is in prison. It is my birthday. 

I have reign'd one year in the wild wood. My mother, 

For whose sake, and the blessed Queen of Heaven, 

I reverence all women, bad me, dying, 

Whene'er this day should come about, to carve 

One lone hour from it, so to meditate 

Upon my greater nearness to the birthday 

Of the after-life, when all the sheeted dead 

Are shaken from their stillness in the grave 

By the last trumpet." 

These serious moments are not, however, per- 
mitted to overweight the delightful fragility of the 
picturesque romance. The fitness of Robin Hood's 
story to English drama has been shown through 



234 ?i;enni20on. 

many a century. Bishop Latimer, in 1549, told of 
coming to a town to preach upon a holy day, and 
finding the church locked : 

'' 1 tarried there half an houre and more," he said, 
' ' and at last the keye was founde, and one of the par- 
ishe commes to me and sayes, Syr, thys ys a busye 
day with us, we cannot heare you ; it is Robyn 
Hoodes Daye. The parishe are gone abroad to 
gather for Robyn Hoode, I pray you let them not. I 
was fayne there to geve place to Robyn Hoode." 
And this the Bishop thought " no laughyng matter," 
but '' a wepynge matter." ^ 

When The Foresters was produced at Daly's thea- 
tre and the New York public '' went abroad to gather 
for Robin Hood," there was similar enthusiasm, and 
Professor jebb, who was on his way to Baltimore, 
wrote back that he was '' a highly compressed and 
squalid object in a back seat amid a seething mass 
of humanity." It is curiously consistent with the 
grace and lightness of Tennyson's octogenarian song, 
that this final essay in drama should be so delicate, 
so complete, so suited to the exigencies of that stage 
which he had not seriously studied, and so perfectly 
in harmony with English sentiment and taste. 

* Taken from R. H. Stoddard's Preface to Ballads and Romances. 




CHAPTER XII. 
•^TWILIGHT AND EVENING BELL" 



WHILE Tennyson was engaged upon the 
enterprises of his later years, he was 
leading a secluded but very interest- 
ing life. On the anniversary of Shakespeare's birth- 
day, 1868, he laid the corner-stone of Aldworth, 
his new home in Surrey, where he was henceforth 
to spend his summers and rid himself of the dis- 
tressing malady of hay-fever, and the distressing 
interruption of inopportune visitors. There he had 
two summer-houses, one for the west wind and one 
for the east, from which he could look on cornland 
and woodland, groves and granges, and where he 
could hear the cries of many birds. He kept his 
love of long tramps, and from the Memoir we learn 
that '' to plant new trees, and to watch the growth of 
what were already planted, continued to be unfail- 
ing sources of pleasure to him. " There is a charming 
account of Garibaldi planting the ''Wellingtonia" in 
the Farringford garden, and we hear of many inter- 
ests connected with the management of the two 
estates. Both at Farringford and Aldworth a large 



235 



236 ZTenn^eom 

hospitality was exercised, not only toward those 
''fortunate persons" whom Tennyson, like Lucy 
Percy, valued by nature, but toward the humblest 
individual who came in sincerity with adequate rea- 
son. Hallam Tennyson tells an amusing story, for 
example, of an American who worked his way across 
the sea on a cattle-ship for the honour of reading 
Maud to its author, who indulged him, but suffered 
from the reading, and then paid his way back to 
America. Toward his servants Tennyson seems to 
have been always considerate and generous, and they 
remained with him after the English fashion for terms 
of many years. With the dumb creatures of his 
household he was also gentle and kind. It is well 
known that he was a passionate anti-vivisectionist, 
and we hear of one occasion when he stole a chicken 
from his own larder at midnight to comfort a new dog. 
In his immediate family there were few changes. 
In 1886; his younger son, Lionel, died as he was 
returning from India : 

** Beneath a hard Arabian moon 
And alien stars." 

With this great exception Tennyson's personal life 
seems to have flowed gently enough in its quiet 
channel, his home remaining a fair and peaceful place, 
inhabited by accordant spirits. His fragile wife out- 
lived him, so that for him the long felicitous com- 
panionship remained unbroken to the end ; and the 
dedication of the last book of his life reveals anew 



''^wiligbt anb lEvening Bell/' 237 

the brightness of his fortune in his most intimate 
experience : 

" I thought to myself I would offer this book to you, 
This, and my love together, 
To you that are seventy-seven, 

With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue heaven, 
And a fancy as summer-new. 
As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the heather." 

Three times during his life Tennyson was offered 
a baronetcy and declined it, preferring his plain title. 
In 1883 the question of a barony was broached. Ten- 
nyson seems not to have liked the idea, but finally, 
by Gladstone's advice, consented to it. He certainly 
had no foolish pride about it, and the fact that it was 
the Queen's pleasure had probably as much as any 
argument to do with moving him toward consent. 
His relations with the Queen had always been singu- 
larly simple and happy. Some of her letters to him 
were almost like the newsy pages that one expects 
from home, — for example, the letter describing the 
wedding of the Princess Beatrice,— and Tennyson on 
his side mingled sympathy and personal affection 
with his reverence and loyalty. In an extract from 
the Queen's private journal, given in the Memoir, is 
found a very characteristic speech that shows the 
temper of his mind toward the royal lady : 

'' When 1 took leave of him," the Queen records, 
'' 1 thanked him for his kindness, and said 1 needed 
it for I had gone thro' much, and he said, ' You are 
so alone on that terrible height ; it is terrible.' " 



238 ^ennijeom 

But whatever his motive for accepting what was 
proffered as an honour, it was not a mean one ; and 
Tennyson was very far indeed from ever parading his 
title. The delightful story is told of him that once 
when the conversation turned upon the House of 
Lords, he suddenly exclaimed : 

'' 1 was just going to say what I would do if I 
were a lord, and then 1 remembered that I was one." ^ 

It was, however, impossible that such a step 
should be taken without sharp criticism from the 
press ; and slurs, with answering defence, were nu- 
merous enough. The most dignified form of the 
argument against the gift of the Peerage is fairly 
represented by the Spectator, which held that the 
honour is not one suited to '' spiritual " merit ; that 
so temporal a gift is not really an honour at all when 
considered as the reward of poetic genius. It says : 

'' Our own view is that a Peerage is an appropri- 
ate distinction only for those who in some degree 
already wield and deserve political influence, and 
not as a mark of popular reverence for any qualities, 
whatever they may be, which justly deserve rever- 
ence. That Tennyson would be a great ornament to 
the House of Lords we are far from denying. But 
he will be an incongruous ornament, — such an orna- 
ment as a wreath of roses round the brow of the 
Governor of the Bank of England, or a spiritual smile 
on the countenance of a London Lord Mayor." 

The Saturday Review, on the other hand, con- 

* " Aspects of Tennyson," The Nineteenth Century. 



''ZTwlllgbt an& fivenlng ffiell/' 239 

sidered that no '' spiritual " or temporal genius could 
enter the House of Lords without receiving at least as 
much honour as he conferred. And, very likely, at 
the foundation of this sentiment was the fear which 
Bagehot expressed in saying that ''the danger of the 
House of Lords certainly is that it may never be re- 
formed. ... If most of its members neglect 
their duties ; if all its members continue to be of one 
class, and that not quite the best ; if its doors are 
shut against genius that cannot found a family, and 
ability which has not five thousand a year, — its 
power will be less year by year, and at last be 
gone." 

What the Saturday Review said is this : 
''The English House of Lords is not more unique 
by its method of constitution than it is by its merit 
of performance. It has not been more prompt to re- 
sist the madness of the people than it has been to 
face the vultus instantis tyranni ; not more sure in 
moderating the thoughtless excesses of democracy 
than it has been in staying the whims of a chambre 
incroyable. The measure of any politician may be 
taken directly from his attitude towards the House 
of Lords — the most august the most peculiar, the 
most beneficial, the most irreplaceable of the ele- 
ments of the English Constitution." And the admis- 
sion of Tennyson on literary grounds (although his 
descent warranted it) doubtless seemed an appropri- 
ate step to take toward keeping the " Upper Cham- 
ber " continuously august and beneficent. 



240 C;enn?6on, 

Being in, Tennyson was not at all inclined to 
shirk his duty. Seventy-five years old and "op- 
pressed with gout," he went up to London in behalf 
of the Redistribution Bill, and wrote a little poem to 
Gladstone, showing him his choice between two 
channels, one leading over a cataract, the other 
streaming "about the bend," and urging him to 
choose the "bend." How much influence he had 
in the matter, prosaically or poetically, it is impossi- 
ble to say ; but the course of the Franchise and Re- 
distribution Bills went in the direction he wished, 
and Gladstone received his congratulations. 

In 1886, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After v^2iS> pub- 
lished, and the excited young lover of the first Locks- 
ley Hall is heard again as "an old white-headed 
dreamer," philosophising upon, and chastising the 
generation. The poem drew from Mr. Gladstone a 
most interesting review of national life during the 
middle years of the century. He pointed out that 
while it was well " to be reminded, and in tones to 
make the deaf man hear, of city children who ' soak 
and blacken soul and sense in city slime ' ; of maid- 
ens cast by thousands on the street ; of the semp- 
stress scrimped of her daily bread ; of dwellings 
miserably crowded, of fever as the result " ; and of 
many other shameful defects in civilisation ; never- 
theless the case was far better than when the first 
Locksley Hall was written. Slavery had been abol- 
ished, the criminal code had been reformed, "laws 
of combination and contract, which prevented the 



''C;wiligbt an^ JSvcning Bell/' 241 

working population from obtaining the best price for 
their labour," had been repealed ; ''the lamentable 
and demoralising abuses of the Poor Law " had been 
swept away ; the scandals of labour in mines, facto- 
ries, and elsewhere had been removed or reduced, 
good schools had been put within reach of the poor, 
means of husbanding savings under the guarantee of 
the State had been provided, cheap communication 
through the post had been established for all classes, 
taxes had been reduced to those " paid to the State 
for the needful purposes of government, and nowhere 
to the wealthy classes of the community for the pur- 
pose of enhancing the prices of articles produced for 
their account." Labouring-people were working 
fewer hours for increased wages, with which they 
could ''purchase at diminished rates almost every 
article, except tobacco and spirits, of which the price 
can be affected by the acts of the Legislature." And 
after citing many more improvements in the social 
order, he continues : 

" And the sum of the matter seems to be that upon 
the whole, and in a degree, we who lived fifty, sixty, 
seventy years back, and are living now, have 
lived into a gentler time ; that the public conscience 
has grown more tender, as indeed was very needful, 
land that, in matters of practice, at sight of evils for- 
merly regarded with indifference or even connivance, 
|it now not only winces but rebels : that upon the 

^hole, the race has been reaping, and not scattering ; 

earning, and not wasting ; and that, without its be- 



242 ZTennijeon. 

ing said that the old Prophet is wrong, it may be said 
that the young Prophet was unquestionably right. "^ 
Undoubtedly the second Locksley Hall was dark- 
ened by the natural pessimism of Tennyson's nature, 
which one could hardly expect to see dissipated by 
the advance of age. Unlike the imaginary victim in 
Matthew Arnold's poem on Growing Old, Tennyson 
never knew what it was to "feel but half, and 
feebly," what he felt. As much as in his youth he 
saw the world with '' heart profoundly stirr'd " ; and 
there is an amount of touching truth in his stanzas : 

"Nay, your pardon, cry you 'forward,' yours are hope and 
youth, but I — 
Eighty winters leave the dog too lame to follow with the cry, 
Lame and old, and past his time, and passing now into the night ; 
Yet 1 would the rising race were half as eager for the light." 

It was his misfortune that when moved to verbal 
castigation, he developed a petulance of expression 
that was very far from poetic. Addressing the 

*' Authors — atheist, essayist, novelist, realist, rhymester," 

who have painted '' the mortal shame of nature with 
the living hues of Art," his poetry loses its charming 
refinement, without gaining the dignity of real irony. 
These stanzas, for example, are not what one expects 
from a trained intelligence : 

' * Rip your brothers' vices open, strip your own foul passions bare ; 
Down with Reticence, down with Reverence — forward — 
naked — let them stare. 

' " Locksley Hall and the Jubilee," The Nineteenth Century, January, 1887. 



**ZvoiliQ\)t anb jEvcninQ Bell/' 243 

Feed the budding rose of boyhood with the drainage of your 

sewer ; 
Send the drain into the fountain, lest the stream should issue 

pure. 

Set the maiden fancies wallowing in the troughs of Zolaism, — 
Forward, forward, ay and backward, downward too into the 
abysm. 

Do your best to charm the worst, to lower the rising race of 

men ; 
Have we risen from out the beast, then back into the beast 

again ? " 

An example of this old Lincolnshire trick of laying 
about him with words is found in a letter to Sir 
Henry Taylor describing an evening spent with Ten- 
nyson.^ 

"Alfred talked very pleasantly that evening to 
Annie Thackeray and L. S. He spoke of Jane Austen 
as James Spedding does — as next to Shakespeare ! 
. . . Alfred has grown, he says, very much fonder 
of you since your two last visits here. He says he 
feels now he is beginning to know you and not feel 
afraid of you, and that he is beginning to get over 
your extreme insolence to him when he was young 
and you were in your meridian splendour and glory. 
4e was very violent with the girls on the subject of 
the rage for autographs. He said he believed every 
crime and every vice in the world was connected with 
he passion for autographs and anecdotes and re- 
:ords ; that the desiring of anecdotes and acquaint- 
mce with the lives of great men was treating them 

* v^utohiography of Sir Henry Taylor. 



244 ?renn?6on* 

like pigs, to be ripped open for the benefit of the pub- 
lic ; that he knew he himself should be ripped open 
like a pig ; that he thanked God Almighty that he 
knew nothing of jane Austen, and that there were no 
letters preserved either of Shakespeare or of Jane 
Austen ; that they had not been ripped open like 
pigs. Then he said that the post for two days had 
brought him no letters, and he thought there was a 
sort of syncope in the world as to him and to his fame. " 

Among the poems published in the 'eighties was 
'' Rizpah." When Swinburne wrote of this poem he 
gave the same rein to his approbation that he else- 
where gives to his disapproval. After an ecstatic 
prelude he proceeds : 

'' Some indeed may probably be found to object 
that pity is here strained and racked into actual and 
intolerable anguish — that terror here darkens and 
condenses into sheer physical pain and horror : and, 
doubtless, of no contemporary writer can it be so 
truly said — nor can it be said more truly of any writer 
in time past — that he has ' created a new shudder ' ; 
a pang of piercing and dreadful compassion which 
cleaves, as it were, the very core of ' the spirit of 
sense ' in sunder. But here is one more proof— and 
a proof beyond all price and beyond all question — 
that passion and imagination are justified of their 
children. Were it not so, the very crowning glory 
of this most pathetic and terrible poem would be 
frightful rather than terrible, and unbearable rather 
than pathetic." 







^ I 

<1 



u 



ZvoHIqU an& lEvenlng Bell/' 245 



Tiresias, which was not published until 1885, 
resulted from a visit made in 1876 to FitzGerald, who 
was then ''an old vegetarian philosopher sitting 
among his doves at Woodbridge." In a letter Fitz- 
Gerald wrote of the meeting : ''Tennyson, a man of 
Genius, who, I think, has crippled his growth by 
over-elaboration, came suddenly upon me here six 
weeks ago, and, many years as it was since we had 
met, there seemed not a Day's Interval between." 
The dedication of Tiresias to FitzGerald describes 
Tennyson's own essay in vegetarianism : 

" And once for ten long weeks I tried 
Your table of Pythagoras, 

And seem'd at first *a thing enskied' 
(As Shakespeare has it) airy-light 

To float above the ways of men, 
Then fell from that half-spiritual height 

Chill'd, till I tasted flesh again 
One night when earth was winter-black 

And all the heavens flash'd in frost ; 
And on me, half-asleep, came back 

That wholesome heat the blood had lost, 
And set me climbing icy capes 

And glaciers, over which there roll'd 
To meet me long-arm'd vines with grapes 

Of Eschcol hugeness ; for the cold 
Without and warmth within me, wrought 

To mould the dream ; but none can say 
That Lenten fare makes Lenten thought, 

Who reads your golden Eastern lay." 

FitzGerald wrote to Fanny Kemble that Tennyson 
looked "much the same, except for his fallen locks," 
as twenty years before. " We went over the same 



246 ^enn?6on* 

old grounds of debate," he said, ''told some of the 
old stories, and all was well. I suppose I may never 
see him again." He never did, nor did he live to 
read the dedication, and the later edition of Tiresias 
gives some beautiful supplementary lines, full of 
mourning for the friend who had been so consistently 
severe a critic : 

'* The tolling of his funeral bell 

Broke on my Pagan Paradise, 
And mixt the dream of classic times 

And all the phantoms of the dream, 
With present grief, and made the rhymes, 

That miss'd his living welcome, seem 
Like would-be guests an hour too late, 

Who down the highway moving on 
With easy laughter find the gate 

Is bolted and the master gone. 
Gone into darkness, that full light 

Of friendship ! past, in sleep, away 
By night, into the deeper night ! 

The deeper night ? A clearer day 
Than our poor twilight dawn on earth — 

If night what barren toil to be ! 
What life, so maim'd by night, were worth 

Our living out } Not mine to me, — " 

Among the poems of the later years were also 
''Vastness," a singularly noble composition, and 
"The Revenge, A Ballad of the Fleet." The latter 
was, it will be remembered, one of the national poems 
that drew Swinburne's praise, and has at the present 
moment a contemporary interest. The opening lines 
show its place among the ballads made to stir the 
British blood : 



''ZTwiligbt an& lEvening Bell/' 247 

*' At Flores in the Azores, Sir Richard Grenville lay. 
And a pinnace, like a flutter'd bird, came flying from far away: 
'Spanish ships of war at sea ! we have sighted fifty-three! ' 
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard : * 'Fore God I am no 

coward ! 
But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of gear, 
And the half of my men are sick. I must fly, but follow quick. 
We are six ships of the line ; can we fight with fifty-three ? ' " 

These poems were the good ripe fruit of the tree ; 
fit to nourish and refresh. They hung among blos- 
soms and leaves, for Tennyson's genius continued to 
bud and flower when everyone looked for the changes 
that come with the seasons. And the final phenom- 
enon was the one that always touches the heart as 
the sight of a pale apple-blossom after the frosts, or 
the springing of a single garden flower to decorate the 
Christmas ground. It had been with Tennyson a 
green winter, and when he was eighty years old he 
offered Demeter and Other Poems to the wondering 
public. The slender little volume can hardly be criti- 
cised from any usual standpoint. Among its contents 
" Merlin and the Gleam " stands out conspicuous as 
an autobiographical outline, and the short-breathing 
lines have in them a solemn suggestion of the close : 

" And broader and brighter 
The Gleam flying onward, 
Wed to the melody, 
Sang thro' the world ; 
And slower and fainter, 
Old and weary, 
But eager to follow, 
I saw, whenever 
In passing it glanced upon 



248 ZTenn^eon* 

Hamlet or city, 

That under the Crosses 

The dead man's garden, 

The mortal hillock, 

Would break into blossom ; 

And so to the land's 

Last limit 1 came — 

And can no longer, 

But die rejoicing." 

The poem with which the volume ends is also one 
of potent and haunting significance. Like a prophesy 
it sounded to the waiting world : 

** Sunset and evening star. 
And one clear call for me ! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar, 
When I put out to sea." 

There are very few instances on record of such sus- 
tained felicity as this ; and its charm is singular. 
That Tennyson, who so much loved the stately har- 
monies of mental existence, whose sense of order 
and fitness was so persistent, should have been 
granted a physical decline so beautiful, and a fare- 
well so equal to his earlier performance, is one of our 
compensations for the jarring irregularities of human 
fate. 

When on Thursday, October 6, 1892, the end 
came, there was nothing to interrupt the effect of 
beauty and harmony. ''There were no artificial 
lights in the chamber, and all was darkness save for 
the silvery light of the moon at its full. The soft 
beams of the light fell upon the bed and played upon 






''ZTwiligbt anb jepeniriQ Bell/' 249 

the features of the dying poet like a halo of Rem- 
brandt." Outside were the woods and rolling 
ground about Aldworth. Toward the last he wan- 
dered and dreamed of walking in his garden with 
Gladstone, showing him his trees. Shakespeare's 
Cymbeline was the last book in his hand, and he had 
opened it at the passage : 

'' Hang there like fruit, my soul, 
Till the tree die," 

and that took place of which Swinburne wrote : 

*' So when night for his eyes grew bright, his proud head pil- 
lowed on Shakespeare's breast. 

Hand in hand with him, soon to stand where shine the glories 
that death loves best. 

Passed the light of his face from sight, and sank sublimely to 
radiant rest." 

Mr. Pickford has quoted in illustration of this tran- 
quil death-scene these verses of Leopardi, which 
came to him, he says, as he lay awake in the moon- 
light of the same lovely night ^ : 

" Intatta luna, tale 
E lo stato mortale. 
Ma tu mortal non sei, 
E forse del mio dir poco ti cale. 
Pur tu, solinga, eterna peregrina 
Che si pensosa sei, tu forse intendi, 
Questo viver terreno, 
II patir nostro, il sospirar, che sia ; 
. Che sia questo morir, questo supremo 
Scolorar del sembiante, 

* In Notes and Queries. 



250 ZTcnnpeon^ 

E perir della terra, e venir meno 
Ad ogni usata, amante campagnia."* 

After the moonlit night was over, and the great 
frame of Tennyson had to be taken out of the charm- 
ing home in which he had so happily and so sanely 
dwelt, his coffin was borne away on one of his own 
waggons, the horse was led by his old servant, and 
the pall that covered him was ''woven by working 
men and women of the North, and embroidered by 
the cottagers of Keswick." 

In Westminster Abbey, where he was laid by 
Browning's side, immediately under Chaucer's tomb, 
and near the bust of Longfellow and the monument 
of Dry den, a vast number gathered to do honour to 
his memory. ''The ' power and presence ' that was 
alive in the Abbey," says a writer in the Spectator, 
" was very different from that which is convention- 
ally associated with the burial of the dead. The 
sense of solemnity was there, but not the sense of 
sorrow, for though this or that man may misunder- 

• Inviolate moon, such is 
The mortal condition. 
But thou art not mortal, 

And perchance for my speech thou carest but little. 
Yet thou alone and forever a pilgrim, 
Pensively wandering, thou perchance knowest 
What is this earthly life, 
What is this suffering, what is this sighing, 
What is this dying and this supremest 
Pallor of countenance. 
This perishing, waning, relinquishing 
All of our loving and constant companionship. 

This does not pretend to be a metrical translation, but gives, I think, the senti- 
ment of the lines. 



''^wlllgbt anb evening Bell/' 251 

stand and misread his own heart, the instinct of a 
mass of men does not err. We were not there to 
mourn some ' mighty poet in his misery dead,' some 
'young Marcellus of our tongue, ' some hope of the 
nation cut off before his time, and carrying with him 
to the grave the unfulfilled promise of high deeds in 
song. Rather we of the English kin, whether here 
or in America, or in other English lands over sea, 
had gathered to honour the memory of a great Eng- 
lishman, and to thank God for a great achievement, 
and a life well spent. In every heart was something 
of the feeling that inspired Milton when he wrote : 

* Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail 
Or knock the breast, no weakness, no contempt, 
Dispraise, or blame ; nothing but well and fair, 
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.* 



''Most appropriately, and, we may add, most 
naturally, an American envoy took his place among 
the great statesmen and men of learning who acted 
as pall-bearers, in order to represent that portion of 
the English kin which lives under another flag than 
that which covered the coffin of Tennyson. The 
men of the rest of Greater Britain were represented 
by their fellow-subjects, but it would have been a 
matter of deep regret if our kinsmen in America had 
taken no share in the ceremony of Wednesday. As 
it was, the right of America to share in honouring 
the poet's memory was fully admitted and a pre- 



252 



^enn?6om 



cedent was created which we trust will never be 
forgotten when any great Englishman is laid in the 
Abbey or St. Paul's." 

During the impressive services two of Tennyson's 
songs, Crossing the Bar and The Silent Koices, were 
sung, the latter to music of Lady Tennyson's own 
composing, and Tennyson lay at last in state among 
his peers, " ' lepere Id-bas dans Vile' was gone." 




CHAPTER XIII. 
ECHOES. 

IMMEDIATELY a great strain of eulogy arosCc 
Those who had known Tennyson in person re- 
called how simple he had been and how sincere. 
" His charm," said Theodore Watts, 'May in a great 
veracity of soul — in a simple single-mindedness so 
childlike that unless you had known him to be the un- 
doubted author of his exquisitely artistic poems, you 
would have supposed that even the subtleties of poetic 
art must be foreign to a nature so devoid of all subtlety 
as his." Others recalled his generosity toward peo- 
ple needing a 'Mift," and his temperate judgments 
of the work of fellow poets. Others still remem- 
bered his magnificent physical presence, how at 
seventy he outwalked a man of forty and was glee- 
ful to see the latter ignominiously resting ; and how 
at eighty-two he climbed a difficult gate and 'Miter- 
ally ran " down a hill. In an article on the various 
portraits of Tennyson, Theodore Watts declared that 
his face was one of the few that do not gain by ''the 

artistic halo which a painter of genius always sheds 

253 



2 54 zrenni^eom 

over his work."^ And he noted for readers of a time 
when memory of the poet's physiognomy should 
have faded, the curious expression of the eyes which 
suggested to him ''the ' song-smith ' of the northern 
Olympus, Bragi, the son of Odin and Frigga, de- 
scribed in the Elder Edda, whose eyes were ' both 
old and young.'" He noted also the line of hair, 
''which indeed may almost be called tresses," upon 
the cheek and neck, so finely given in the portraits 
by Watts, and the colour of the skin, which was not, 
he said, really of a dark complexion, but was deeply 
tanned by the sun. And he found his personal im- 
pression of Tennyson's aspect most truly rendered 
by the photograph by Mayall, hanging at Aldworth. 
The impression made upon a very large number of 
persons by Tennyson's death is given in a paper con- 
tributed to the Speaker. It is an impression of the 
heart, not of the intellect, and is interesting because 
it is representative : 

"You ask me," the writer begins, "why I, a 
middle-aged business man, with, as you phrase it, 
'more than enough to do on my own account,' 
should have travelled two hundred miles and given 
up a day and a half of precious time merely in order 
to witness the poet's funeral. " Then, recalling Thack- 
eray and Dickens, both dead, the writer quotes Ten- 
nyson's own line, 

** Three dead men have I loved and thou art last of the three," 

and proposes through his own experience to illustrate 

^ The Magazine of Art, 1893. 




Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1888. 



From life. 



iecboc0. 255 

Tennyson's hold upon the men and women past the 
middle years, and sufficiently prosaic to the outer 
view, who thronged the Abbey on the day of the 
funeral. 

"Tennyson has been my friend and companion 
these forty years," he says, ''in the sense in which 
he has been the friend and companion of thousands 
of other men, for my personal knowledge of him was 
hardly greater than that which I had of Thackeray 
and Dickens. As I look back on those forty years of 
work and endurance, I see hardly an episode or an 
hour in which this man on whose coffin I looked to- 
day, was not with me — a friend, a teacher, and a 
guide. In what varied moods he has found me dur- 
ing these years of pilgrimage, and how fully he has 
responded to each ! When first I came by the great 
railway from the North to London, it was the lines in 
Locksley Hair which sprang to my lips as I leaned 
from the carriage window to catch the earliest reflec- 
tion of the lights of the wonderful city in the even- 
ing sky. It was Maud and Enoch Arden on which I 
fed myself when the moment of romance came to 
me, as it does to all of us once at least, and the 
chord of self, smitten by the hand of Love, ' passed in 
music out of sight.' It was in The Princess that I 
found the picture of the ideal woman I had sought 
for and won at last. And then came the long even- 
ings of happy married lovers, when the same volume 

' " Eager-hearted as a boy when first he leaves his father's field, 
And at night along the dusky highway near and nearer drawn 
Sees in heaven the light of London flaring like a dreary dawn." 



256 ?renn?9om 

had two readers instead of one, and we went hand 
in hand through the flowery paths by which our 
poet led us. In my heart I thanked him for those 
far-off hours of a joy almost divine, when 1 stood in 
the Abbey to-day. But it was later — a few brief 
months later — when the poet came to me in another 
guise, and stretched forth his hand as a brother, and 
held me up, and made me face the world again. 
. . . 1 had read In Memoriam before ; 1 have read 
it many times since ; but it is only when one reads it 
by the hearth that has suddenly become cold, in 
presence of the empty chair, the empty bed, that its 
inner meaning is borne in upon the soul." 

In this frank avowal of sentiment it is easy to trace 
the nature of Tennyson's service to the multitude ; 
his sublimation of their usual thoughts about the 
strange facts of their existence ; his imaginative ver- 
sion of every-day life. Such is the undoubted source 
of his influence over the ordinary school-taught mind ; 
but it needs to be capped by the recognition which 
Mr. Traill has made of its separateness from Tenny- 
son's true poetic gift : '' When we talk of Tennyson's 
'popularity,'" he says, ''intending thereby to de- 
scribe that wide and increasing influence which he 
exercised for upwards of forty years over the minds 
of educated Englishmen, let us not forget that in this 
connection we are not really speaking of him as a 
poet at all. Let us not forget that, though to have 
yielded such a power is a good and a great thing,— 
is, if you like to think so, a better and a greater thing 



j£cboe0* 257 

than to have been the greatest of poets,— it is not 
the same thing, and in short, that the influences in 
question are of something not primarily and essen- 
tially connected with Lord Tennyson's poetic gift 
at all." 

To Mr. Edmund Gosse this popularity, this mass 
of humanity attending the public services at West- 
minster, this excitement of critics suddenly de- 
claring that poetry had died with Tennyson, this 
over-wrought sentiment in the minds of the people, 
seemed a perilous sign. ' ' I think, " he wrote, ' ' of the 
funeral of Wordsworth at Grasmere, only forty-two 
years ago, with a score of persons gathering quietly 
under the low wall that fenced them from the brawl- 
ing Rotha ; and 1 turn to the spectacle of the 12th, 
the vast black crowd in the street, the ten thousand 
persons refused admittance to the Abbey, the whole 
enormous popular manifestation. What does it 
mean ? Is Tennyson, great as he is, a thousand 
times greater than Wordsworth ? Has poetry, in 
forty years, risen at this ratio in the public estima- 
tion ? The democracy, I fear, doth protest too 
much, and there is danger in this hollow reverence. 

''The danger takes this form. It may at any 
moment come to be held that the poet, were he 
the greatest that ever lived, was greater than poetry, 
the artist more interesting than his art. This was a 
peril unknown in ancient times. The plays of Shake- 
speare and his contemporaries were scarcely more 
[Closely identified with the man who wrote them than 



258 ?renn^6on* 

Gothic cathedrals were with their architects. Cow- 
ley was the first English poet about whom much 
personal interest was felt outside the poetic class. 
Dryden is far more evident to us than the Elizabeth- 
ans were, yet phantasmal by the side of Pope. Since 
the age of Anne, an interest in the poet as distin- 
guished from his poetry has steadily increased ; the 
fashion for Byron, the posthumous curiosity in Shel- 
ley and Keats, are examples of the rapid growth of 
this individualisation in the present century. But 
since the death of Wordsworth it has taken colossal 
proportions, without, so far as can be observed, any 
parallel quickening of the taste for poetry itself. The 
result is that a very interesting or picturesque figure, 
if identified with poetry, may attract an amount of 
attention and admiration which is spurious as regards 
the poetry and of no real significance. Tennyson 
had grown to be by far the most mysterious, august, 
and singular figure in English society. He repre- 
sented poetry, and the world now expects its poets 
to be as picturesque, as aged, and as individual as he 
was, or else it will pay poetry no attention. 1 fear, 
to be brief, that the personal as distinguished from 
the purely literary distinction of Tennyson may strike, 
for the time being, a serious blow at the vitality of 
poetry in this country." ^ 

From this dark prophecy, which in half a dozen 
years has not been contradicted, Mr. Gosse passes 
on to show how alien to Tennyson's own spirit were 

* Article on Tennyson in The New Review. 



the lamentations with which his surrender of the 
poetic field to his successors was greeted. 

''The ingratitude of the hour towards the surviv- 
ing poets of England," he says, ''pays but a poor 
compliment to the memory of that great man whose 
fame it professes to honour. 1 suppose that there 
has scarcely been a writer of interesting verse who 
has come into anything like prominence within the 
lifetime of Tennyson who has not received from him 
some letter of praise, some message of benevolent 
indulgence. More than fifty years ago he wrote, in 
glowing terms, to congratulate Mr. Bailey on his 
' Festus ' ; it is only yesterday that we were hearing 
of his letters to Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. William 
Watson. Tennyson did not affect to be a critic— no 
man, indeed, can ever have lived who less affected 
to be anything — but he loved good verses, and he 
knew them when he saw them, and welcomed them 
indulgently. No one can find it more distasteful to 
him to have it asserted that Tennyson was, and will 
be, ' the last of the English poets,' than would Ten- 
nyson himself. It was not my good fortune to see 
him many times, and only twice, at an interval of 
about twelve years, did I have the privilege of hear- 
ing him talk at length and ease. On each of those 
occasions, however, it was noticeable with what 
warmth and confidence he spoke of the future of 
English poetry, with what interest he evidently fol- 
lowed its progress, and how cordially he appreciated 
what various younger men were doing. In particu- 






26o ^enu^son. 

lar, I hope it is not indiscreet to refer to the tone in 
which he spoke to me on each of these occasions of 
Mr. Swinburne, whose critical conscience had, it 
must not be forgotten, led him to refer with no slight 
severity to several of the elder poet's writings. In 
1877 Mr. Swinburne's strictures were still recent, and 
might not unreasonably have been painfully recol- 
lected. Yet Tennyson spoke of him almost as Dry- 
den did two hundred years ago to Congreve : 

* And thus I prophesy — thou shalt be seen 
(Though with some short parenthesis between) 
High on the throne of wit, and, seated there, 
Not mine (that's little), but thy laurel wear.' 

It would never have occurred to this great and wise 
man that his own death could be supposed to mark 
the final burning up and turning to ashes of these 
prophetic bays." 

When we come to the appeal made by Tennyson's 
poetry to the small number of judicial minds that 
were uninfluenced by personal emotion, we find it sin- 
gularly independent of the long poems. A volume 
could be made up of the shorter pieces ranking with 
" Morte d'Arthur," " Ulysses," " Tithonus," and the 
songs in Maud, that would arouse enthusiasm of 
a purer fiame, perhaps, than could be awakened by 
the Idflls of the King, or In Memoriam, or The 
Princess. They are not the ''popular" poetry that 
comes naturally to the lips when Tennyson's name is 
mentioned, that is quoted in essays on literature, and 



JEcbocB. 261 

repeated at school exhibitions ; but they torm the 
ballast that steadies the critical impression of the 
work as a whole. And what variety is in them ; how 
much they contain of the essence of pure poetry ! 
Tennyson's experience of life was not compressed : 
unlike Musset, unlike Keats, he had not a single 
hour full to the brim of emotion ; but a life slowly 
developing through more than eighty years. Some 
of his later poems are infinitely more beautiful than 
most of his earlier ones ; some of the earlier — the 
'' Ulysses," for example — have a maturity of quality 
never exceeded. But we must follow the entire 
course, from ''Claribel" to ''The Dreamer," if we 
would get the range of his best ; and if part of the way 
lies through the commonplace, the exquisite serenity 
and purity of the end brings unusual compensation. 
Age is not often permitted to express itself as with 
Tennyson, and one of the rarest pleasures to be 
found in reading his collected work is to trace the 
larger interests and calmer view in the poems written 
after the limit of threescore years and ten, when or- 
dinarily, if all is not labour and sorrow, all is vague- 
ness and inertia. At the time of his death a poem 
was written about him, giving a new reading to the 
old saying, ''Whom the gods love die young," by 
finding youth still blooming in his age. And so it 
was in one sense ; but it is still more satisfying to re- 
member that his age was not like real youth, but was 
the true age of man, the normal, conscious, vigor- 
ous age of a sane mind in a sane body ; the ripening 






262 ITenn^eom 

of the spirit without the loss of self-expression, and 
without the flitting of the precious individuality. 
This health and persistence, so noticeable in his gen- 
ius, showed equally in his character. His friends 
seem to have experienced no falling off, no waning 
of personal attractiveness ; there was no temptation 
to think that it was well for the body to decline since 
mind and spirit had sunk. Jowett, who had written 
in 1862, ''[ sometimes think that merely being in 
the neighbourhood of Alfred keeps me up to a higher 
standard of what ought to be in writing and think- 
ing," found the loss that came thirty years later 
almost heavier than he could bear. 

When the authoritative biography of Tennyson 
appeared in 1897, after four years of careful prepara- 
tion by the present Lord Tennyson, an immense 
satisfaction was felt by the literary public. There 
was nothing in the published material to change the 
prevailing impression of Tennyson's greatness of 
character and dignity of life ; and the fulness of the 
account, and the nature of the testimony brought by 
old friends and private letters and records, precluded 
the idea that any reservations or omissions had been 
made which could seriously mar that noble impres- 
sion. It was found that with rare and admirable taste 
Lord Tennyson had left his '' sources " to speak in the 
main for themselves. What he added was merely 
the affectionate tribute of a son to a father. The 
story is naturally not particularly rich in adventure ; 
there was but one real adventure to record,— the 



TEchOCB. 263 

visit to the Spanish insurgents, — and upon the subject 
of this romantic episode little is said. Neither are there 
any details of spiritual and personal crises, such as are 
revealed by the letters of men like John Addington 
Symonds and Robert Louis Stevenson. If Tennyson 
had his intense hours of mental stress, we shall never 
hear of them. Nor is there very much of the inde- 
scribable pungency that lingers in the faintest reminis- 
cence of Thackeray and the barest anecdote of Charles 
Lamb. In his youth Tennyson was poor ; but there 
are no details of picturesque poverty. The one love 
affair is the enduring passion for his wife, but, though 
the period of long waiting offered a capital chance for 
fine writing, it is disposed of in the fewest possible 
words. In fact there is nothing in Tennyson's bio- 
graphy to excite the fancy of the reader. For this 
very reason the book is fascinating. It is like a Doric 
temple in its unimpeachable severity. We see the 
poet steadily employed with his art, never entirely 
distracted from it, or finding contradictory outlets for 
his genius. What he cared for was what furthered 
and harmonised with the making of poetry. His 
friends were chosen upon the high level of his own 
intellectual capacity. To some of them he looked up ; 
to few of them can he have looked down. There 
were no degradations of taste or of principle ; it was 
a wholly moral life in the sturdiest sense of the word. 
Nor was it lacking on the human side. Single sen- 
tences spoken of his wife or to his children, or, cu- 
riously enough, to his Queen, reveal the fire and 



264 n;enn?6on- 

impulse at the core of Tennyson's nature, ''too deep 
for sound and foam." His talk, in the main, was 
about subjects of permanent importance ; he was 
ready always to hear of the advance of science in 
any field. Human progress was the most poetic fact 
with which he could occupy his mind, although his 
efforts to clothe it in poetic language did not always 
accomplish his object. The most interesting and 
unique feature of the biography is the collection of 
reminiscences at the end, contributed by old friends, 
some of them already dead, all of them at the season 
of the yellow leaf. These also follow the general 
plan adopted, which excludes anything like trivial 
gossip or inconsequent detail. They add, however, 
an appreciable amount to one's realisation of Tenny- 
son's good-fellowship with his friends, and of his 
kind, engaging ways when he was at home in mind 
and spirit. We hear of his humour, of his teasing, 
of his grumbling, of his strength and his weakness, 
of his shyness and frankness ; most of all, of his 
*'loveableness." The Duke of Argyle contributes an 
anecdote of singular charm. 

''The first words 1 heard him utter," he says, 
" remain indelibly impressed upon my memory. On 
being introduced to him at an evening party in the 
house of Lord John Russell, I said, perhaps with 
some emotion, ' 1 am so glad to know you.' Not in 
the tone or voice of a mere conventional reply, but 
in the accents of sincere humility, he answered, 
' You won't find much in me— after all.' " 



l£c\)oce. 265 

This reply indicates the one fact absolutely neces- 
sary to remember in forming a fair estimate of Tenny- 
son's character, — his essential humility. He never 
indulged in any cant about it ; but no one can read 
his familiar letters without realising how little he was 
satisfied with himself and his achievement in com- 
parison with the great best to which he continually 
aspired. The fact that he pitched his ideals so high, 
and tried for perfection in all the ways he knew, ac- 
counts for his success in poetry. Others have had 
more of the divine spark ; many others have had 
stronger personal views and clearer insight, but very 
few have been strong enough to sustain such danger- 
ous facility as his by unwavering devotion to the high- 
est standard of performance. In the biography are 
eighty-three poems hitherto unpublished ; and while 
in the main they are of high excellence compared to 
the average poetical effusion, they bear witness to Ten- 
nyson's good judgment in rejecting them. He sup- 
plied certainly one half the requirement which, Mr. 
Henry James has told us, is made by any artistic per- 
formance, whatever the instrument. He supplied 
"the perfect presence of mind, unconfused, unhur- 
ried by emotion," the ''clear and calculated" appli- 
cation of the idea. Had he carried out the rest of 
the formula, had the ideas themselves been con- 
ceived by him '' in the glow of experience, of suffer- 
ing, of joy," there could never have been two words 
about his greatness as an artist. Among his unpub- 
lished poems is one beginning : 



266 ?renn^0on. 

'' Art for Art's sake ! Hail, truest Lord of Hell ! 
Hail, Genius, Master of the Moral Will ! " 

But, in spite of the uninterrupted supremacy of 
the Moral Will in his mind, was there ever a better 
example than he himself offers of art for art's sake," 
as most of us understand the phrase ? Did he not 
tame and subdue his noble talent in working outside 
his own experience, because he so much loved the 
work and so little realised the necessity to genius of 
an individual conception ? And this, too, is a part 
of his integral humility. Had he more heartily be- 
lieved that there was much within himself to be 
sought and found and expressed, had he insisted 
upon drinking from his own glass, believing it to 
hold the wine best suited to him, we might have 
had a Musset plus a Tennyson. And as it is, we 
may follow M. Taine's example, dismiss our critical 
analyses, and '' prefer" our Tennyson. 





CHAPTER XIV. 
''CONTEMPORARY POSTERITY." 

LOWELL says that posterity is seldom wont to 
judge a writer by his best rather than by the 
average of his achievement, and if this is 
true of posterity it is doubly true of that substitute 
for posterity, — the criticism of alien minds. In fact it 
is doubtful if our best is ever really known to the for- 
eigner, and vice versa. Everyone who has read it 
must remember Hamerton's description of the schol- 
arly Frenchman who knew most of the great 
English authors "even down to the close critical 
comparison of different readings," but could not 
write or speak English in a manner tolerable to an 
Englishman. '' His appreciation of our authors, "said 
Mr. Hamerton, ''especially of our poets, differed so 
widely from English criticism and English feeling 
that it was evident he did not understand them as 
we understand them. Two things especially proved 
this : he frequently mistook declamatory versification 
of the most mediocre quality for poetry of an elevated 
order ; whilst, on the other hand, his ear failed to 

perceive the music of the musical poets, as Byron 

267 



268 ITenn^eon. 

and Tennyson. How could he hear their music, he 
to whom our English sounds were all unknown ? 
Here, for example, is the way he read ' Claribel ' : 

* At ev ze bittle bommess 

Azvart ze zeeket Ion 
At none ze veeld be ommess 

Aboot ze most edston 
At meedneez ze mon commess 

An lokez dovn alon 
Ere songg ze lintveet zvelless 
Ze clirvoic-ed mavi dvelless 

Ze fledgling srost lispess 
Ze slombroos vav ootvelless 

Ze babblang ronnel creespess 
Ze ollov grot replee-ess 
Vere Claribel lovlee-ess.' " 

Against this disadvantage of imperfect compre- 
hension may be placed, however, the advantage of 
sufficient aloofness to command the whole view. 
The perspective for which we have to wait a century, 
or a couple of generations at least, the foreign critics 
obtain by virtue of modes of thought, and, more par- 
ticularly, modes of feeling, quite different from our 
own. They are not cheated into admiration or affec- 
tion by the sense of kinship— the faults of the writer 
under their consideration wound them not at all, nor 
do his virtues reflect credit in the slightest degree 
upon themselves. They are quite free to take an 
impartial view, and the view is therefore apt to be 
interesting, whether we agree with it or find it as 
objectionable as we are prone to find the national 
dishes of other countries. 




George Frederick Watts, R.A 



From life. 



•^Contcmporar)? ipoaterit?/' 269 

As early as 1847, Tennyson's poetry was attracting 
critical attention in France. Writing of the 1842 
collection, M. ForgueSy in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 
finds that Tennyson '' to no greater degree than John 
Keats, to no greater degree than Samuel Coleridge," 
fulfils to his mind the ' ' first conditions of all fame that 
shall be at once universal and durable." 

" Deprive his verse of its voluptuous melody, its 
merit of scholarly archaism," he says, '' and you will 
already have done it irreparable harm, for Tennyson 
is creator only in details of style. Finder of words 
rather than of ideas, he borrows willingly and without 
overmuch discrimination, the commonplace theme 
upon which he loves to spend the richness of his 
harmonic combinations. Whether through inability 
or veritable disdain, he, preoccupied chiefly with the 
lyric effect, hardly reveals a glimpse of the inner 
drama, of the human fact from which emanate, 
laughing or sorrowful, sympathetic or scornful and 
bitter, the effusions of his thought. With him the 
reality is confounded, amalgamated, with the dream ; 
it takes on vague proportions, a supernatural character. 
Nothing precise or palpable is discoverable. In these 
Eolian poems, the women are the sylphs, the pas- 
sions, the entities of the Germanic mind, mere 
musical abstractions ; the description, — often ad- 
mirable, — a mirage about to vanish. 

'' From time to time, it is true, English realism 
brings light into this vapoury chaos, and in a fashion 
sufficiently bizarre. The wandering will-o'-the-wisp 



2 70 XTennpaon. 

becomes a lantern omnibus ; by the side of the sing- 
ing syren is heard the squawking goose, and you 
have hardly quitted the fanciful country, the en- 
chanted isle of the Lotophagi, when you find yourself 
on a cross-road in the company of simple travellers 
who have come afoot to wait for the mail coach : 
tremendous discords which cannot fail to throw the 
reader's mind into some degree of embarrassment." 

Among the several poems chosen by M. Forgues 
for translation is ''The Sisters," and it rather upsets 
the general idea of French sensitiveness to find him 
translating the third stanza with omissions. The 
original, he says, shows ''a Shakespearian naivete 
which in French is neither tolerable nor tolerated." 
One point that he makes is interesting : '' Upon oc- 
casions," he says, '' Dickens's prose and Tennyson's 
verse offer striking resemblances. The thoughts have 
an air of belonging to the same family ; the very 
words take on an analogous physiognomy or har- 
mony. To be convinced, compare the account in 
The Old Curiosity Shop of Nelly's funeral with the 
'New Year's Eve,' or the ' Dirge,' or any other elegy 
in which the poet is filled with the spectacle of 
death and burial. The comparison is in this instance 
the easier that Dickens has written in irregular blank 
verse the passage to which we refer our readers." 

M. Milsand, writing in 1851, probably before In 
Memoriam reached him, said with more judgment 
than prophetic power : 

" M. Tennyson has Vhaleine courte, he is incapa- 



ff 



Contemporary poeterit?/' 271 



ble of a prolonged effort. Vast combinations should 
not be expected from him, but he will not attempt 
that which he cannot do. His talent obeys his nat- 
ure with docility, and the mind loves to linger over 
his works, delighting to look upon a planet which 
shines because it remains admirably within its orbit. 
That which is true of all superior men may be said 
of him : that the faculties which they have not are 
as useful to them as those which they possess. If 
the chords of his instrument quickly cease to vibrate, 
it is to that very quality that they owe their exacti- 
tude ; it is that which renders them always ready to 
respond to the least breath." 

After the publication of the 1864 edition of the 
Idylls of the King, M. Taine elaborated his compari- 
son between Tennyson and Musset. His estimate 
of the former is so well known that it will only be 
necessary to recall two or three significant passages. 
Mailed is the only poem that calls out enthusiastic 
admiration ; In Memoriam, as we have seen, is dis- 
missed with a few words that contain something 
very like a sneer. The Princess is ''a fairy tale as 
sentimental as those of Shakespeare." In the Idylls 
''Tennyson has renewed the feelings and the lan- 
guage ; and his pliant soul takes all tones in order to 
give itself all pleasures. This time he has become 
epic, antique, and ingenuous like Homer, and like 
the old trouveres of the Chansons de Geste.'' (How 
unlike surely no one could have known better than 
M. Taine.) 



2 72 ICenn?0on» 

If we sum up the criticism we are strongly im- 
pressed by the fact that, while M. Taine was writing 
of Tennyson, he was thinking of Musset, of how dif- 
ferent he was, how superior, how much more French, 
how much more real ! In the final paragraph, all the 
critic has not said positively of the English poet he 
says negatively in extolling his contemporary : ''We 
feel pity ; we think of that other poet, away there in 
the Isle of Wight, who amuses himself by dressing 
up lost epics. How happy he is amongst his fine 
books, his friends, his honeysuckles and roses 1 No 
matter. De Musset, in this very spot, in this filth 
and misery, rose higher. From the heights of his 
doubt and despair, he beheld the infinite, as we be- 
hold the ocean from a storm-beaten promontory. 
Religions, their glory and their decay ; the human 
race, its pangs and its destiny ; all that is sublime in 
the world, appeared to him there in a flash of light- 
ning. He felt, at least this once in his life, the inner 
tempest of deep sensations, giant dreams, and intense 
pleasures, the desire of which enabled him to live, 
and whose lack forced him to die. He was no mere 
dilettante ; he was not content to taste and enjoy ; 
he left his mark on human thought ; he told the 
world what was man, love, truth, happiness. He 
suffered, but he invented ; he fainted, but he pro- 
duced. He tore from his vitals with despair the idea 
which he had conceived, and showed it to the eyes 
of all, bloody but alive. That is harder and lovelier 
than to go fondling and gazing upon the ideas of 



tt 



Contemporary poeterlt?/' 273 



others. There is in the world but one work worthy 
of a man, the production of a truth to which we de- 
vote ourselves, and in which we believe. The people 
who have listened to Tennyson are superior to our 
aristocracy of townsfolk and bohemians, but I prefer 
Alfred de Musset to Tennyson." 

M. Montegut, in 1866, with Enoch Arden, and 
Other Poems for his theme, brings the same charge, 
but more directly as well as more delicately, against 
Tennyson's general style. " The sentiment of 
beauty," he says, ''may, and too often does, create 
in a poet a state not unlike barrenness. Mr. Tennyson 
has more than once suffered this experience ; a cer- 
tain absence of heat is felt in him, a too great tran- 
quillity ; sometimes, also, a sort of powerlessness to 
express what is purely moral as perfectly as that 
which is purely beautiful. We shall not reproach 
him for having always ignored the strong but some- 
what rude sympathies of the political partisan, since 
for the high-born soul there is ordinarily too much 
hate and too little love in these robust sympathies, 
whose fire and salt too often amount to obstinacy 
and harshness. Nor shall we reproach him for ignor- 
ing the strong conviction of the partisan philosopher 
which savours too much of pedantry for so delicate a 
soul ; but what we could wish added to his talent is 
more heat, a stronger grip, a more ardent curiosity, 
something, in short, of that impetuous admiration 
land that passionate sympathy with which the great 
poets of all times have been inspired by the richness 



2 74 ^ennijeom 

and potency of the human soul, with which, for ex- 
ample, Robert Browning, his own neighbour and col- 
league and rival before Apollo, has been inspired." 

The volume under discussion, however, reveals 
Tennyson's power of bending to meet humble reali- 
ties, and it is more praiseworthy, M. Montegut de- 
clares, in one of Tennyson's nature to stoop to what 
is humble than to rise to what is noble. 'Mn fact, 
where is the great merit," he says, '' in comprehend- 
ing and loving what is noble when one so well com- 
prehends and loves what is beautiful ? To pass from 
one of these worlds to the other is hardly to change 
the sphere. The magician who evokes the beautiful 
Helen can with the same formula summon the valiant 
Achilles; the poet who has just written 'A Dream 
of Fair Women ' can, without putting any constraint 
upon his imagination, follow with 'Morte d'Arthur,' 
and the epic Idylls oj the King may succeed the 
aristocratic talk of The Princess with no need for a 
change of tone on the part of the author. There is 
transition, but the passage is easier than from the 
beautiful to the humble ; and if it is not difficult to 
describe a knight after having described a lady, and 
to become absorbed in a noble soul after being inter- 
ested in a beautiful face, quite another effort is re- 
quired, after the intoxication of these fine sights, to 
delight in describing the person of a sailor burnt and 
browned by the sun and rain, to take pleasure in the 
skeptical jargon of an English farmer, or to glean with 
difficulty the seeds of poetry hidden beneath a rustic 



''Contemporary? poetcriti?/' 275 

roof. This, however, is what has been done by Al- 
fred Tennyson, the correct and polished singer of 
aristocratic elegance, the lettered classicist, the ingeni- 
ous imitator of the old masters. Far from turning 
away from these humble realities, he has sought them 
out, and they have rewarded him, for he owes to 
them one of his most incontestable titles to fame, the 
idyll of familiar and domestic life." In rehearsing the 
merits of the poems, M. Montegut struggles manfully 
and with wonderful success against the difficulties of 
''The Northern Farmer," confessing that it took him 
half a day to translate the dialect into ordinary Eng- 
lish, and quoting the first stanza with malicious glee 
in foreseeing the bewilderment of his readers. Enoch 
Arden seems to him as simple as it seemed ornate to 
Mr. Bagehot, and '' Aylmer's Field " makes no appeal. 
''Sea Dreams " is frankly given up ; but the one fine 
sentence which almost justifies the poem is extracted : 

** Forgive ! How many will say, 'forgive,' and find 
A sort of absolution in the sound 
To hate a little longer." 

And when M. Montegut reaches "Tithonus" he 
reads into it a very suggestive meaning which can cer- 
tainly by the exercise of imagination be found there. 

"In his lamentation the old husband of Aurora 
expresses to us one of the most painful sentiments 
that can weigh upon the heart in a timeworn society : 
the sentiment born of the discord between a task in- 
cessantly renewed, and forces too wearied to sustain 
the burden laid upon them by the exigences of civil- 



2 76 TTenni^eon^ 

isation. The work to be accomplished returns each 
morning, young as the dawn ; and, each morning, 
the souls charged with its accomplishment waken 
with the lassitude of Tithonus. It is immortal age 
beside immortal youth. Ah ! how much more equal 
was the union in the old times ! " 

In conclusion, M. Montegut permits himself a 
cautious glance into the future, and declines to 
prophesy whether the new volume is really the in- 
auguration of a new style, or whether it is chance, or 
a passing essay to be at once abandoned. The wis- 
dom of this caution the later years have shown. 

When Queen Mary was published, and before it 
was acted, M. Leon Boucher discussed it at consider- 
able length, finding it typical of such dramatic genius 
as remained in England, hunted from the stage into 
the study. Tennyson, among others, he says in his 
article, has '' desired to attempt in his turn a career 
that is not without its dangers, and he has not feared 
to risk his fame on this throw of the dice. He has 
wished to show the young critic who reproaches him 
with being the commonplace echo of aristocratic 
salons and a lady's poet, that his voice can find 
virile accents upon occasion, and that the gift of 
supreme grace is not in his case incompatible with 
strength. For some years it has been said that the 
Laureate's poetry has had its day, that his rose-water 
knights are no longer in fashion, and that the future 
belongs to Mr. Browning's difficult and profound 
enigmas, or to the sonorous hymns in which Mr. 



u 



Contemporar? IPoaterit?/' 277 



Swinburne loves to sing the myths or antiquity, the 
forces of nature, and the triumphs of liberty. The 
statue raised by the admiration of his readers to 
the author of Idj^lls oj the King has been found, it is 
said, to have feet of clay ; the slightest blow would 
overturn it. Mr. Tennyson has been meditating upon 
this ; abandoning legend for history, and the heroes 
of the Round-Table for the characters of Shakespeare, 
he has composed his drama of Queen Mary, which 
has been the literary event of the past year on the 
other side of the channel. The surprise was natural 
enough, for nothing in Mr. Tennyson's previous 
work indicated the new direction just taken by his 
talent at a time of life when it is not usual to change 
one's route. What is difficult at the moment is to 
determine whether the success has been as great as 
the attempt was bold ; this the near future must 
decide, if, as we are told, the Laureate's drama is 
destined to pass from the book to the stage." 

After a minute examination of the play, in which 
its best and its worst points are well brought out, 
M. Boucher continues : 

" Has a fold of Shakespeare's mantle fallen upon 
Mr. Tennyson's shoulders ? This is the question 
Queen Mary has started in the world of criticism. 
What seems clear is that the author would have 
spared his judges much expenditure of ink if, in place 
01 calling his work a drama, he had given it the more 
flexible and less compromising title of dramatic poem. 
If by a drama is meant, as certain critics have defined 



2 78 ^enn?6on* 

it, a definite action with a beginning, a plot, and a 
denouement, Queen Mary hardly justifies its title. 
Strongly to desire marriage, to espouse an unamiable 
prince, to live very unhappily with him, to seek in 
the persecution of heretics an insufficient consolation, 
and to die in bed of a fever, constitute a variety of 
things, undoubtedly, and while they may be brought 
well together, the result is not, properly speaking, 
dramatic action. There is rich enough matter for 
romance ; but tragedy is sought in vain in this succes- 
sion of events. In all dramas it must be felt, however 
feebly, that there is a plot, a progression in interest ; in 
one word, a crisis. There is nothing of the kind in 
Queen Mary, Why the personages go and come, en- 
tering and departing, why they are there, even, and 
what they are doing, is a mystery. They are there by 
the poet's wish, that is all. A series of pictures are un- 
folded without other connection than that of chrono- 
logical succession. There are no skilfully prepared 
surprises, no ingenious combinations, no stirring 
catastrophes. All these people talk and recount ; 
they do not act at all, having nothing to do. We 
recognise that a hidden art has presided over the dis- 
position of the acts and the scenes, but it is an art 
quite different from that which we must ask from 
writers who work for the stage. Shakespeare, it will 
be said, did not do otherwise. With this great mas- 
ter there are no coups de theatre, or rigorous chains 
of circumstance. He is content to follow the order 
of events and fill the frame that history has placed 



''Contemporari? ipoeterit^/' 279 

for him. It is true that in this respect Mr. Tennyson 
has shown himself an apt pupil. He has not limited 
himself to reproducing the scenic arrangement of the 
historical plays of his model ; he has sought to obtain 
that mingling of the familiar and the sublime which 
gives to these plays such a puissant reality. He has 
brought into his drama a current of trivial gayety and 
popular jocularity. Thus Elizabeth, reproaching an 
envoy of the queen for appearing in her presence 
without attending sufficiently to his dress, says to 
him : 

* God hath blest or cursed me with a nose — 



Your boots are from the horses.' 

Such also is this criticism made by an old woman 
upon the punishment of Cranmer and the policy of 
Mary : 

" ' Ay, Joan ; and Queen Mary gwoes on a-burnin' 
and a-burnin', to get her baaby born ; but all her 
burnin's 'ill never burn out the hypocrisy that makes 
the water in her.' 

" But this imitation of the Shakespearian forms on 
the part of the modern poet is only a way of trick- 
ing the eye of the reader ; the resemblance stops 
there. With the author of Richard III. and Henry 
yilL, all is action ; with the author of Queen Mary, 
all is recital or portraiture. The method is entirely 
different. Shakespeare puts his characters under 
the light of their public life. He does not go out 
of his way to guess what history has not revealed 



28o zrenn^eon. 

to him. He clings closely to the chronicles, taking 
scoundrels or saints, heroes or cowards, princes, 
lords, and clowns, as they are furnished to him, with- 
out troubling himself about anything more than to 
make them seem natural. And such is the power 
of his genius, that he seems in all his plays to have 
created rather than to have resuscitated them. Mr. 
Tennyson, on the contrary, peers into the inti- 
mate life of his characters like an antiquarian. He 
sees in them not living beings, but historic figures 
which he must reconstruct with the greatest care. 
He calls analysis to the aid of imagination, he de- 
scends into the conscience of his queen and into that 
of his bishops ; he inquires the most secret motives 
of their acts ; he becomes an erudite historian ; for- 
getting to be a creator and a poet. The result, there- 
fore, is not happy. We see how these heroes have 
been manufactured, and recognise in them only 
puppets more than usually well dressed. If, unfor- 
tunately, we have read M. Froude, all illusion disap- 
pears. We continually find ourselves recalling faces 
that we have seen before. When Elizabeth speaks 
of old Gardiner, of his ' irritable forelock which he 
rubs, ' of his ' buzzard beak and deep-incavern'd eyes, ' 
we know whence came the portrait. In the poetic- 
ally emphatic language of Cardinal Pole, in his end- 
less tropes and his biblical allegories, we feel the 
style of the legate's Latin letters quoted by the histo- 
rian. The same could be said of Lord Paget and of 
Lord Howard, and of Philip and of Simon Renard, 




The Very Reverend Dr. Butler. 



*' Contemporary IPoeteriti?/' 281 

and especially of Mary herself; all have been painted 
with the poet's eyes fixed on the history-book ; all 
have their germ in Mr. Froude's beautiful prose. 
And indeed, is Mr. Froude not the one to whom 
Mr. Tennyson should have dedicated his volume ; 
saying something like this : ' This book is yours, I 
give it to you ; without you it would not have been 
made ' ? " 

To this limited group of French representatives we 
will add one more name. M. Filon, in 1885, contrib- 
uted to the Revue des Deux Mondes a long article in- 
troduced by the announcement: "The Tennyson 
cult is organised ; it has its rites, its initiates, its 
legends ; it has even its skeptics and its atheists, 
whose manifestations vary from smile to insult. 
A legion of commentators has commenced to por- 
tion out his works. Some seek the poetic sys- 
tem ; most of them detach the dogma and the moral 
lesson ; others study what is obscure and delight in 
what is unintelligible. In the distance a heavy step 
is heard ; the Germans are approaching. But the 
prey is living. The hour of the Teuton scholiast has 
not yet sounded. In France, Tennyson is studied as 
a classic, and the committee on public instruction has 
by a judicious selection placed Enoch Arden and the 
Idylls of the King upon our programmes. The mo- 
ment seems to have arrived for offering to the public 
an all-around view that shall serve as a clue to this 
work which is luxuriant, mysterious, varied of aspect, 
and difficult of access to foreigners." 



2 82 TTenn^aom 

After a careful examination of most of the more 
important poems, M. Filon sums up his impression 
of Tennyson's poetic quality : 

*' Nathaniel Hawthorne," he says, '* encountering 
Tennyson, in 1857, at the Manchester Exhibition, 
tried in vain to define his impression. ' All that 1 can 
say,' he wrote to a friend, ' is that he has an un-Eng- 
lish and at the same time not an American look.' ' 

''This phrase was striking, and came back to us as 
we were trying to characterise some of the features 
of Lord Tennyson's literary physiognomy. We are 
tempted to apply to the talent what has been said of 
the man. Certainly he has the qualities and defects 
of his race. He is English when he loves the fields 
and the sea ; he is English in his scorn of the Celt, 
in his hatred of Rome ; English in patriotism and in 
pride. But we believe that he will never by future 
historians of literature be considered a representative 
of the Saxon genius in the same way as Shakespeare 
or Dickens. Taste with his compatriots is only dis- 
taste. We do not despise this mental disposition ; 
aversion to that which is unclean and unhealthy is 
always a safeguard and often an inspiration. But 
something more must be recognised in Lord Tenny- 
son : the choice of elements, the art of composition, 
the science of proportion, and, throughout, the ex- 
quisite feeling for sound and form. An after-touch is 
an artistic effort, an erasure — with due deference to 

^ The actual phrase is : '* Un-English as he was, Tennyson had not, however, 
an American look." 



''Contemporary poeterit?/' 283 

those who boast of pouring themselves forth upon 
paper like a torrent — is a sign of intelligence. How 
many after-touches and erasures in Tennyson ! We 
could show him, for example, three times remaking 
that passage in The Princess where he has simply to 
bring before us three men letting themselves slip 
from the top of a rampart like spiders hanging from 
the end of their thread. This scrupulousness is an 
honour to the writer. The molten metal flows from 
a cast and is of no value ; a thousand strokes of the 
hammer are necessary to give to the forged object its 
form and its price. 

'' As to the harmony of words, Tennyson possesses 
it, not as a Parnassian, not as a virtuoso of caesura 
and rhyme, but by instinct, through genius. His 
verse imitates everything — the neighing and gallop- 
ing of horses, the dry murmur of guitar-strings, the 
tearing sound of the clarion, joyous or drawling vi- 
bration, bells, echoes waning and dying, the grating 
sound of the wave grinding the pebbles on the 
strand, all the sounds of living nature from the growl 
of thunder to the burring of the grasshopper. In his 
plays he bends to his use the alliteration of the old 
Saxons, at the same time borrowing from the pros- 
ody of the Greeks their scholarly flexions. Some- 
times he gives richness and amplitude to his song by 
composite words which he brings together or unlinks 
at will ; sometimes he originates velvety gamuts of 
marvellously adjusted monosyllables. Our professors 
have recommended to our admiration the famous line : 



284 TTenn^eon* 

* Le jour n'est pas plus pur que le fond de mon coeur.' 

What would they have said if someone had told 
them that one of the most melodious stanzas of In 
Memoriam counts in eight lines but two dissyllabic 
words, and fifty-eight words of one syllable without 
ceasing to caress the ear ! Sometimes the meaning 
of these lines is vague. What matter ! A false 
shame keeps us from admitting that in poetry, as in 
music, the charm is often in inverse ratio to the pre- 
cision. Tennyson, like Mendelssohn, has his ' songs 
without words,' in which words are not so much in- 
tellectual signs as musical notes. It is with these 
vague, delicious modulations that three or four gen- 
erations of young men and women have already sung 
lullaby to their dreams. 

'' If we admire the great artist, we reserve the best 
of our sympathy for the sincere thinker. Literary 
sincerity ! who troubles himself about it to-day ? 
In criticism, to serve one's coterie or injure one's 
neighbour, one leans always to one side or the other ; 
in romance, one swells, one lashes oneself into aping 
passion ; the historian recounts the past, thinking of 
the present, often of the future. We leave aside po- 
litical eloquence, which lives on lies. The furious 
search after novelty, the need of advertisement, the 
prejudice of systems, party spirit, scholastic servility, 
or fear of the rabble ; we do not undertake to say 
which of these causes has most contributed to 
the reign of falsehood ; but we do state that, since 
Diderot, nearly all our great writers have been great 



''Contemporary poeterlt?/' 285 

liars as well. To say only what one has himself 
thought and felt, and nothing more : the author who 
will seriously abide by this plain rule will make a 
revolution in literature such as Descartes made in 
science. That is why we love the sincerity of Lord 
Tennyson. It makes the moral value of his work, 
the identity of his talent in the midst of multiple 
transformations ; and through it, after many imita- 
tions and essays, he has conquered his originality." 
Ten years later, and three years after Tennyson's 
death, this appreciative critic reviewed in an article 
on '' Le Theatre Anglais Contemporain " the sum of 
Tennyson's dramatic production. 

'' Mr. Archer," he says, '' remarks that Tennyson, 
who was so fortunate in his poetic life, lacked fitness 
, for his career as a dramatist. He wrote his plays too 
late and too soon : too soon for the public and too 
late for his talent. He was, in truth, sixty-six years 
old when he published Queen Mary, the first in date 
of his six dramatic pieces. That was twenty years 
ago, and the education of the audience was far from 
being as advanced as it is to-day. It was not their 
fault if they brought to the poet a taste somewhat 
spoilt by the success of Our Boys and Pink Dominoes, 
and a soul closed to the higher delights of the imag- 
ination. The players did their duty by the Laureate 
and even a little more than their duty ; it is criticism, 
— and, here, I shelter myself under the authority of 
the most eminent member of the society of critics,— 
it is criticism that has decided the repulse given to 



286 ^enni?6on* 

Tennyson's dramas, and if it did not precisely con- 
demn him unheard, it at least heard him under the 
dominion of a preconceived idea. I shall borrow Mr. 
Archer's acute expression : the critics ' expected to 
be disappointed ' ; they came for that alone. Why 
should an old man enter upon a new career, and one 
for which youth itself has need of all its powers ? 
What has possessed him to discover in himself fresh 
faculties at an age when ordinarily one can only re- 
peat oneself ? Has a man any right to be good at 
two trades ? Is there not against this sort of thing a 
' law of cumulation ' tacitly acknowledged by the 
critics, and applied by them with pitiless severity ? 
For the success of this logic it was necessary that 
Tennyson should fail in drama : so he failed. 

'' But, as this repulse was not just, he recovered 
from it, and his drama, even when it is common- 
place, even when it is bad, belongs to the living 
drama. 

" I have fallen into the common mistake. In the 
course of the first articles which I had the honour of 
inserting in this Review, I spoke of Tennyson, in 
1885, as if the tomb had already closed over him. 
Perhaps I was correct in saying that in the garden of 
the poet upon which winter had descended, certain 
flowers would not flourish. But what was not then 
apparent to me, and what to-day is manifest to me 
and to many others as well, is that the last age of 
the poet has preserved some of his early graces, and 
has developed before our sight qualities unknown to 



*' Contemporary? poeterit?/' 287 

his youth. To the end he remained in touch with 
the soul of the humble. Furthermore, he has shown 
himself a master in the art of giving poetic and vivi- 
fying expression to the social and religious discus- 
sions by which we are moved. He has used in the 
service of the stage a historic and a dramatic sense 
of the highest order, and, if these two gifts some- 
times work injury to each other, to the point of para- 
lysing each other, their combination at a fortunate 
moment has furnished us with fragments of dramatic 
masterpieces. 

''I shall consider his plays not in chronological 
order, but in the order of their importance. The 
slightest of all is The Falcon. The scene is laid in 
some vague region of a half-fantastic Italy ; with no 
indication of place or century. It is a well-known 
tale by Boccaccio ; but a purified and simplified Boc- 
caccio. A poor gentleman, Federigo, entertains a 
respectful and hopeless love for the beautiful and 
wealthy widow, the Lady Giovanna. His last posses- 
sion, his pride, his joy, and, also, his one means of 
gaining a livelihood is an admirable falcon which he 
himself raised for the chase. One morning the Lady 
Giovanna, unaware of her neighbour's poverty, invites 
herself to breakfast without ceremony. Federigo, 
whose larder is empty, has his favourite bird killed 
and served to the lady. But it is the falcon for which 
she has come to ask him, to satisfy the whim of a 
sick child. Federigo is forced to confess the sacri- 
fice inspired by his hospitality and love, and the Lady 



288 ^enn?6om 

Giovanna is so touched by it that she falls, and for- 
ever, into his arms. When The Falcon was pre- 
sented to the public in 1879, at St. James's, John 
Hare, who is a manager of excellent taste and also an 
admirable actor, used respect and love in the mount- 
ing, giving it a poetically realistic setting. Federigo 
and the Lady Giovanna were taken by the Kendals, 
and those who have seen Madge Robertson in this 
role remember how much she suggested a picture by 
an old master, in a German or an Italian museum. 
From the plastic point of view she has, in creating 
Giovanna, given a pendant to her Galatea. But 
neither the charm of the scenery, nor the perfec- 
tion of the acting, nor the music of the lines could in- 
sure long life for the play. Just a few hundred 
chosen spectators enjoying this light thing for an 
hour, enthusiastic for an evening. Then on the mor- 
row cockneyism takes possession of the hall and asks 
for its usual pleasures again. The critics made com- 
mon cause with the cockneys, but for a reason less 
foreign to art. They said that if there be any ' mo- 
tive ' to The Falcon, it is apparently Federigo's sacri- 
fice. But this motive, slender as it is, has not been 
developed. Two words apart with his servant, an 
order in an undertone, and that is all that leads up 
to and justifies the condemnation. More deceptive 
than the breakfast offered to the Lady Giovanna is 
the menu presented by Lord Tennyson to his audi- 
ence, consisting as it does only of delicate hors 
d'ceuvres, too meagre for those robust appetites. 



''Contemporary poaterlt?/' 289 

'' The Promise of May has had a worse fate than 
The Falcon. The play unreservedly collapsed. A 
certain part of the public — with the famous Marquis 
of Queensberry at its head — pretended to believe 
that the poet spoke through the mouth of his hero, 
where he denounces with so much bitterness and in 
a disquieting jumble of words, the principles and 
prejudices upon which society is built/ These peo- 
ple were certainly decifient in patience and intel- 
ligence. The argument against Harold's negative 
theories was not lacking. When he has finished 
declaiming upon the subject of the evil brought to 
mankind by religions, Dora points out to him (some- 
what feebly, it is true) the benefits it has received 
from them. After he has prophesied the approach 
of the universal dissolution of the marriage bond, she 
replies to him simply, but not without emotion and 
grace ^ : ' And yet 1 had once a vision of a pure and 
perfect marriage, where the man and the woman, 
only differing as the stronger and the weaker, should 
walk hand in hand together down this valley of tears 
to the grave at the bottom, and lie down there to- 
gether in the darkness which would seem but a 
moment, to be wakened again together by the light 
of the resurrection, and no more partings for ever and 
ever ! ' And when Harold breaks off for her a spray 



' Here M. Filon has fallen into error, as the Marquis of Queensberry did not 
assume that Tennyson was exploiting his own views, but that he was misrepresent- 
ing the views of the agnostic party. 

' She does not "reply to him," but soliloquises in her room. 



290 Zi;enn^0on» 

of apple-blossoms/ this farmer's daughter looks sor- 
rowfully at the devastated branch : ' Next year there 
will be no apples there. '^ That is touching symbol- 
ism, and it is agreeable to find a poet refuting the 
ethics of the feeling by which flowers are plucked 
only to prevent the birth of the fruit and to destroy 
the seed of the future. 

*'By such detail was Tennyson's thought re- 
vealed, and they should have gained him the indulg- 
ence of the hissers : but these would not listen to 
reason. Such misconceptions are only possible with 
a play that is not its own defence. But, unfor- 
tunately, The Promise of May is such a play. There 
are to be found in it some traces of those idyllic gifts 
which gave to the little poems of Tennyson's youth 
so much charm, together with that comprehension 
of the rustic mind which never abandoned him, and 
a bitter eloquence, a vein of moral and social satire, 
currents of which flowed through the second part of 
Locksley Hall, Sixty Years After. But when it 
comes to the action, the poet is deplorably weak, 
childish, almost silly. This Harold who in the begin- 
ning poses as the type of nihilist whom nothing can 
agitate or terrify, falls finally into such stammering 
disorder that one is ashamed for him. If Tennyson 
wished us to regard the marriage of this sad seducer 
with the sister of his victim as a satisfaction to 



• He breaks them off for Eva, and it is Eva, not Dora, who answers him. For- 
tunately M. Filon's contempt for accuracy does not extend to essentials. 

'^ " You have robb'd poor father often good apples," is what she really says. 



f( 



Contemporary poaterit?/' 291 



morality, he is gravely mistaken, and the little that 
remains of the play vanishes with this repulsive 
denouement/ 

''The relative success of The Cup, at the Lyceum, 
astonishes me less than it has astonished Mr. Archer. 
I shall not seek the principal cause in Ellen Terry's 
grace or in the magnificent decoration of the temple 
of Diana. The Cup has certain qualities which are 
made to please the average public. The subject is 
taken from Plutarch's tales of The Virtues of PVomen, 
and from one episode which already had drawn into 
tragedy a Frenchman, a German, and an Italian. Per- 
haps, without precisely knowing it, Tennyson took 
something of the tone of his original author and of 
the manner of his forerunners. He has been this 
time less English, less Shakespearian, and less him- 
self than in his other works. The dialogue is rapid 
and stirring ; the characters do not yield themselves 
to poetic fantasies, they develop no theories, they 
express emotions that have nothing complicated 
or strange about them. One of them, Synorix, is 
interesting. Apart from the Don Juan-ism which too 
much modernises him, this ambiguous type, half bar- 
baric, half Roman, whose intelligence has been re- 
fined but whose passions have not been eradicated 
by civilisation, is an exceptional creature, a kind of 
monster, who knows his intellectual superiority and 
his moral deficiency ; uniting these two sentiments 
in a melancholy which is not without grandeur. 

' It will of course be remembered that Harold does not marry Dora. 



292 ITenn^eon. 

The attraction of this character has been the source 
of Tennyson's failure with the play ; he has departed 
from the motive that Plutarch offered him, and that 
impressed Thomas Corneille and Montanelli, the lat- 
ter making use of it with talent and success in spite 
of a florid style. This motive is the action of Cam- 
ma, the widow of the Galatian tetrarch whom 
Synorix, with the aid of the Romans, had killed 
and succeeded in power. Synorix loves her and 
wishes to marry her. Gamma cannot consider this 
odious marriage, but pretends to consent. After the 
sacred rite, she is to touch with her lips the cup that 
Synorix drinks from before the altar of Diana. She 
makes him drink of death from this cup, and does the 
same herself. In order that this culmination should 
awaken no objection in our mind, we must be made 
to hate Synorix as Gamma hates him. But Tennyson 
seems to have made every effort to diminish the hor- 
ror of his character. He has given him the prestige 
of a noble sadness, the excuse of a great love, has in 
some sort obliged him to kill his rival as a method 
of legitimate defence. He has completed the effect 
by showing us in Gamma's first husband an unintel- 
ligent and brutal individual who poorly justifies the 
regrets and sacrifice of the young wife. Add to this 
the fact that if the real motive lies in the hidden 
drama passing in Gamma's soul, we know nothing 
of it until the last scene. A coup de theatre does not 
make a play, and Mr. Archer is undoubtedly right in 
preferring Montanelli's work to that of Tennyson. 



'' Contemporaru poeterit?/' 293 

In spite of its faults, however, I believe that The Cup 
will again find, as in 1881, a favourable reception 
with the public. It decidedly suggests our own 
tragedies by the dignity, the decency, the serious- 
ness undisturbed by any comic element, by that iden- 
tity in the characters, that continuity of tone, and 
that unity of action, which, whatever one may say, 
pleases the mind better than the most faithful im- 
itation of the contrasts and incoherences of life can 
please it. 

''If he had written only The Falcon, The Cup, 
and The Promise of May, Tennyson would hold but 
a very small place among dramatic writers. If he is 
to live on the stage, it is through his three historic 
dramas : Queen Mary, Harold, Becket. 

''These dramas, it was said, were very inferior, 
even before their birth, to the historic dramas of the 
Elizabethan age, the style and character of which 
they so faithfully imitate. In fact, the Histories of 
Shakespeare and of his contemporaries were shaped 
in the Chronicles, which keep the vivacity of per- 
sonal impression and the warmth of life itself almost 
as much as Memoirs. Tennyson, on his part, took 
his dramas from history so called ; but history is like 
a serious and scientific person who dissects life to 
study it the better ; who discusses instead of narrat- 
ing, and puts modern judgments in the place of an- 
cient passions. This objection is plausible, but that 
is all. In the first place, the definition given to his- 
tory is true, perhaps, of the work of a Guizot, a Hal- 



294 ZTenn^Bom 

lam, or a Lecky, but would ill apply to a Carlyle, a 
Michelet, or a Taine. In reading Freeman, and par- 
ticularly Froude, was Tennyson further from direct 
contact with the soul of the past than Shakespeare in 
going through the often cold and languishing pages 
of Holinshed ? And, again, were Froude as senten- 
tious and frozen as he is on the contrary picturesque 
and impassioned, Tennyson would have counteracted 
this defect by his own qualities. It is the time to 
render full justice to his delicacy and to the veritably 
incomparable power of his historic sense. An his- 
torical drama, if I understand the words, contains his- 
tory and drama. But, among the authors of historical 
dramas in this century, who has been an historian 
and at the same time a dramatist and a poet ? 

'' It is not a question of the historical critical sense, 
— in no wise involved in this matter, — but of the gift, 
accorded to few, of the imaginative sense able to 
make live again the emotions of a century sleeping in 
the dust. Michelet thus saw the torture of Jeanne 
d'Arc, Macaulay the trial of Warren Hastings, Carlyle 
the taking of the Bastille and the battle of Marston 
Moor. A hundred times more precious is their intel- 
lectual vision than the eyesight of a Holinshed or an 
Ayala. 

"This rare gift was one of Tennyson's privileges, 
and in him it took that feminine acuteness that re- 
fined all his poetic faculties. For proof, take all the 
by-play of his historic pieces, all not essential, all 
accessory action, detail of manners, minute traits of 



'* Contemporary poaterlt?/' 295 

character, fragments of history— for instance, the 
story of the marriage of Philip and Mary, that of the 
torture of Jane Grey by Bagenhall in Queen Mary ; 
and in Becket the sarcasms launched at the Roman 
Church by Walter Map, the spiritual precursor of the 
bitter and sombre Langland. A Bulwer, a Tom Tay- 
lor, can cut out little bits from a chronicle, or frame 
historic sayings in his prose ; can he, as Tennyson 
does, compel us to see states of soul, and plunge in 
the depths of the ancient life ? 

'M am well aware that this is not all ; that it is, 
indeed, nothing if the poet cannot add dramatic force 
to this power of intimate evocation. Is there a 
drama in Becket, in Queen Mary, in Harold ? My 
answer— juror-fashion — is : to the first question. No ; 
to the second and third, Yes. 

''True, Becket, in the summer of 1893, attained 
brilliant success, but three fourths of that success 
were due to Irving. Those to whom the great actor 
has long been familiar know to what degree he is 
Episcopal, Pontifical, hieratic. Medieval asceticism 
is a mode of being which his artistic personality fills 
most exactly, in which it ensconces itself at greatest 
ease. It was worth a long journey and hours of 
fatigue to watch that symbolic game of chess in 
which the struggle of bishop and king foretokened 
the whole play ; or that striking dialogue in which 
Becket recounts to his confidant his tragic anguish 
and his prophetic dreams ; or that stormy discussion 
at Northampton where the Archbishop first signs the 



296 tCenn^eom 

famous ' constitution ' and then retracts ; or that 
assassination scene which follows history step by 
step, and where, moreover, pure pantomime would 
have sufficed. They who saw Irving, mitre on head 
and cross in hand, fall stricken on the steps of the 
altar while faint waves of the monks' chant floated 
down from the church above, mingled with the 
cries of the people battering at the portal and the 
rumblings of thunder with which the vast and un- 
just basilica quivered to its foundations, have ex- 
perienced emotion as powerful as any spectacle has 
ever yielded. 

'' Nevertheless the drama is missing, for a drama 
is a situation evolving through transformation, it is 
action in movement. The duel of the King and the 
Prelate is, in the play as in history, only a confused 
series of indecisive encounters. The metamorphosis 
of the soldier-courtier into the martyr-bishop is hardly 
indicated by the poet. And what can be said of the 
amorous idyl annexed to the play, in defiance of his- 
tory and of the drama itself? All Ellen Terry's tact 
could not save the insipid Rosamond. The compli- 
cations as to the mysterious retreat of the young wo- 
man smack more of farce than even of melodrama; 
and as to the amusing details with which the episode 
is relieved, their comedy is so flat and on so low a 
plane as to be slightly nauseating. I pass that feature 
in silence rather than incur the pain of subjecting a 
man of genius to ridicule, but I cannot help blaming 
Tennyson for his irreparable error in compromising 



''(Tontemporar)? Ipoeteritij/' 297 

Becket by his equivocal adventure, and in giving him 
the custody of the King's mistress at the very mo- 
ment he was with such boldness holding the King 
in check. 

''The same criticism cannot be directed to the 
Qiieen Mary nor to the Harold. In the first, the 
psychologic human drama, half submerged but never 
wholly hidden by history, lies in the development of 
the character and the mournful fate of the wretched 
Queen ; it lies in the path, first strewn with flowers 
and then paved with sharp stones and thick with 
thorns, along which she moves, in so few years, from 
a prolonged youth to premature age, from enthusias- 
tic joy to lonely, accursed, and despairing agony and 
death. As Queen, she dreamed of the grandeur of 
her realm, and left it smitten by the national disgrace 
of the loss of Calais. As a Catholic, she sought to 
restore her religion, and far from succeeding she 
opened between her people and Rome an abyss 
which the centuries have not closed. As a woman, 
she loved a man of ice, a living rock by whom her 
heart was wounded and broken. Before her death 
she knew the wreck of all her plans, and read scorn 
and disgust in the eyes of him to whom in propitia- 
tion she had offered human sacrifices. 

'' This is the drama Tennyson has sketched if not 
fully accomplished in Qiieen Mary. That which 
forms the subject of Harold stands out in full light 
in striking relief. It is the struggle of religious faith 
with patriotism and ambition. All the sentiments 



298 zrenn?0on* 

aroused on the one part and on the other are indi- 
cated with superiority worthy of the master in the 
successive scenes at the court of William while Harold 
is a prisoner there. After policy has spoken by the 
lips of the old Norman Lord, comes the sublime 
scene in which Wulfnoth, Harold's younger brother, 
describes to him the slow torture of the prisoner, the 
living dead man, forever cut off from love, from the 
sight of fields and sea and sky as from the society of 
men, his very name vanishing from their memory, 
eaten out by forgetfulness as his body in his cell 
is eaten by the hateful vermin of the earth. When 
Harold has yielded, it is a touching thing to see him 
bow, with Edith, before Christian fatalism, sacrificing 
to his kingly duty, as the atonement for his violated 
oath, his own happiness. The dilemma changes, 
and its two new aspects are personified in two wo- 
men, whose rivalry is in no wise banal, and never 
suggests those vulgar outbreaks of jealousy to which 
the theatre has too much accustomed us. Edith 
surrenders to Aldwyth, the living hero ; dead, she 
claims him again with a nobility and pride in her 
accent that thrill us. 

"Thus the legacy of the great lyric poet to the 
theatre of his country consists of two dramatic 
works — I cannot venture to call them chefs-d'oeuvre 
— surrounded by a vein-stone of history, in itself ma- 
terial of extraordinary value. There comes a pious 
hand to disengage the two dramas and set the air cir- 
culating about their essential lives ; there comes a 



''Contemporary poeterit?/' 299 

great actor who comprehends the character of Har- 
old and embodies it, a great actress who devotes 
herself with passion to the character of Mary, and 
without effort Tennyson takes his place among the 
dramatists." 

When we recall Tennyson's not too exuberant 
affection for the French, it seems a little odd that 
they should have been on the whole so much more 
appreciative of him than the Germans. Perhaps ap- 
preciative is not just the word. The Germans trans- 
lated him with characteristic thoroughness, and some 
of the translations went through so many editions 
that we can hardly consider him put down as a negli- 
gible author in that country. But when he took his 
place in the Litteratiir Geschichte it was not a very 
enviable place. Bleibtreu, for example, denies that 
he was a poet 'Mn the higher and highest sense of 
the word," and finds that while his roses are without 
thorns they are also often as scentless as the gorge- 
ously coloured Bengal rose. 

''The most noteworthy of his personal experi- 
ences," he says, '' is that he spent his youth among 
the Lincolnshire moorland, which he sketched in a 
masterly fashion in 'The Dying Swan,' for example, 
while his later life was spent in the paradise of the 
Isle of Wight, the physiognomy of which stands 
out in ' The Gardener's Daughter ' ; since for so great 
a landscapist such retreats in which to study are 
veritably important events. The measureless adora- 
tion which is paid to these national poets leads 



300 ZEenn^aom 

necessarily to contradiction, the more that Enoch 
Arden with truly English perspective is neglected, and 
the tiresome ' Day-Dreams,' ' Vision of Sin,' and so 
forth, are emphasised. There is a good deal of truth in 
Professor Austin's bitter attacks against him, and the 
comparison of his Pegasus to a thorough-bred racer 
without a sign of wings is sufficiently striking. But 
whether Shakespeare and Byron would drive him 
' out of Elysium to ' the garden that he loves is un- 
likely. Especially would the latter, whose name was 
the unavailing war-cry on the lips of the Convulsive 
Poets, honour in Tennyson the tasteful artist who 
unites Wordsworth's absorption in Nature with the 
classic word-painting and chiselled form of Childe 
Harold. In reality, Tennyson beheld Nature solely 
with the eyes of a landscape painter. There is 
nothing of Shelley's mystical symbolising of Nature. 
Of the godlike idea of ErsoheinMngsfonn he knows 
nothing. He is the true poet of the century, transcen- 
dentalism has no charm for him. With his landscape 
painting is united the sense of historic costuming, 
which together with his absorption in the woman- 
soul he shared with Victor Hugo. ' Simeon Stylites,' 
* Lucretius,' 'Ulysses,' are original cabinet-pieces of 
this sort. Originality, the prime characteristic of 
genius, he certainly possesses only in limited quantity. 
He has copied many styles, and in the process he has 
fused them all into one Tennysonism. Nor does his 
philosophic sense spring from anything but his going 
back to and living in the time of the Minnesingers. 



ft 



Contemporary poeterit?/' 301 



Heavenly and earthly bards are the fountains of his 
reflection, as with Wolfram von Eschenbach." 

Wulker says that all the lyric poets of our time 
hark back to Tennyson, but '' in spite of his gift Ten- 
nyson has struck out no new path. The age of 
Queen Victoria, so epoch-making in romance, is for 
lyrics only a period of beautiful after-bloom. Ten- 
nyson's poems are above Byron's in point of agree- 
able sound, and can only be likened to Shelley's. 
His thoughts are not always new, but the form in 
which he gives them is nevertheless peculiar to him- 
self. A true Englishman, he is as far removed from 
Byron's cosmopolitanism as from Shelley's polythe- 
ism. He does not care to go frequently into distant 
times and alien countries, and if he does it once as in 
the Idflls of the King, the figures bear a very modern 
stamp, and therefore stand very close to the people 
of the present time." 

In Engel's Geschichte der Englischen Litteratur, 
the direct question of Tennyson^s entrance into that 
'Mittle society" in which there is no crowding, is 
plainly faced. 

''One question must be asked," the critic de- 
clares, "concerning every poet who is considered 
' great ' by his countrymen : What new thing has he 
said to the world at large or even to his own country 
alone ? For Tennyson it may be answered in this 
way : he has given substantial aid in the formation 
of the new romanticism in England, and he has given 
to the lyric many new forms. The romanticism of 



302 ^enn?0om 

Tennyson and of his followers lies in the revival of 
the King Arthur fables. Now that this romanticism is 
entirely dead, we can regard them as merely a pretty 
play with a subject already tested ; as unspontaneous, 
unreal poetry. Not even Tennyson's mastery could 
infuse life into the forms of Arthur, Lancelot, Guine- 
vere, etc. This new English romanticism seemed 
in essence not quite so artificial as the coquetting 
with classic mythology that went on in the eight- 
eenth century, or the rioting in Oriental gorgeous- 
ness characteristic of the early part of the nineteenth. 
Nevertheless not one stanza of Tennyson's many 
Arthur-poems will live. ... Of his many vol- 
umes very little, perhaps only here and there one of 
his little songs, will survive ; but with the English 
people the memory of him as a noble man and a poet 
of fine feeling will outlive his work." 

In Italy Tennyson's fame was spread by Signor 
Bellezza's Life, which must be, we imagine, a very 
interesting contribution to the mass of Tennyson 
literature. As it could not be procured in time to 
serve the purposes of this chapter, we shall have to 
content ourselves with a few fragments culled from a 
review in the Athenceum,^ and in themselves quite 
significant of the critical attitude of the writer : 

''The metre which the Laureate prefers is the 
iambic, as best adapted to the patient and minute 
elaboration, and to the systematic distribution of 
parts in which he delights. This metre is the base 

' October 13, 1894. 



''Contemporary? poeterit^/' 303 

of the heroic stanza, rhymed and unrhymed, and it is 
the measure in which all the masterpieces of English 
literature were written : The Canterbury Tales, Para- 
dise Lost, Pope's Essays and Satires, Dryden's Fables, 
Shakespeare's Tragedies, The Faery Q_ueen, The Re- 
volt of Islam, The Excursion, Don Juan, and Childe 
Harold. Occasionally, as in Locksley Hall, Tenny- 
son adopted the trochaic measure to express the 
tumult of passion and the raging of the elements ; 
while in Maud he drew marvellous effects from alter- 
nated anapaests. 

''. . . But for better appreciation of the minute 
and delicate care which our poet devoted to form, 
we must enter, so to speak, the workshop of his art, 
examine closely the devices and details, and observe 
the methods and the infinite elaboration by which he 
attains perfection in word and phrase. His is a lan- 
guage which has been fused into harmony by a thou- 
sand refinings, and consequently ' to analyse a work 
of Tennyson's it is always necessary to observe all 
the minuti^ of form.' One of these peculiarities of 
form is his use of monosyllabic words. One of the 
most inspired stanzas of In Memoriam contains in 8 
verses only 2 dissyllabic words, while 58 are mono- 
syllables. Of the 197 words in one of the stanzas in 
Maud (XVIIl. 8), 164 are monosyllabic : the third 
stanza of the youthful 'Rosalind' consists of 122 
words, of which 104 are monosyllabic and only 18 
polysyllabic. . . . 

" Frequently, to give perspicuity and effectiveness 



304 ^enn?9on. 

to his thought, the poet resorts to compound words, 
notably in the Idylls, to which this device lends a 
certain archaic colour in harmony with their subject. 
The following examples are taken from the Idylls: 
bee-chen (!) ; furze-cramm'd ; bracken-rooft ; wide- 
wing'd ; death-dumb ; autumn-dripping ; slender- 
shafted ; heather-scented ; silver-misty ; wan-sallow ; 
satin-shining ; gloomy-gladed ; May-blossomi ; hawk- 
eyes ; tip-tilted ; topaz-lights ; livid-flickering ; green- 
glimmering ; sallow-rifted ; passion-pale ; love-royal 
tenderest-touching ; dark-splendid ; jacinth-work 
many-knotted ; many-cobwebb'd ; tiny-trumpeting 
ruby - circled ; stubborn-shafted ; dusky - rafter'd 
newly-fallen ; and so forth. 

''Sometimes he abuses this expedient, and in- 
dulges in certain monstrous combinations, which 
tend to affectation and awkwardness, even when 
they do not enfeeble or obscure the idea which he 
desires to make more clear and impressive. A good 
example is the adjective ' lily-cradled,' which he ap- 
plies to the bee to indicate that it was cradled in 
the lily. Another is 'brain-dizzied,' in 'The May 
Queen '; the Idylls contain a number of these vicious 
combinations, as 'bridge-broken,' 'tip-tilted,' 'knee- 
broken,' 'head-stock,' 'kitchen-vassalage,' etc." 



INDEX. 



Academy, the, on Becket, 229-231 

Age, Tennyson's, 261, 262 

Aird, Thomas, 72 

" Akbar's Dream," 45 

Albert, Prince, 192 

Aldworth, 235 

America, Tennyson's sympathy with, 
62, 70, 107, 120, 129 ; represented 
at Tennyson's funeral, 25 1 

" Ancient Sage, The," 45 

Argyle, the Duke of, 264 

j4rt Journal, the, criticism on Pre- 
Raphaelite illustrations, 163-166 

Art, Tennyson's interest in, 175 

j4then£eum,\he, 123, 125,232 

Austen, Jane, 243 

Austin, Alfred, on Tennyson's sensitive- 
ness, 105 

" Aylmer's Field," 214, 275 

B 

Bagehot, Walter, estimate of the value 
of college life, 14 ; on Enoch Arden, 
193-195 

Bag Enderby, 2 

Bailey, Mr., 259 

"Balin and Balan," 176 

•' Ballad of the Fleet," the, 128, 246 

Barony, 237 

Barrett, Elizabeth, see Mrs. Browning 

Bayne, on " The Palace of Art," 31 

Becket, 218, 224-231 

Bellezza, Signor, criticism of Tennyson's 
poetry, 302-304 



Bells and Pomegranates, sold at six- 
pence, 72 

Bells, Lincolnshire, 42, 43 

Birth, Tennyson's, 2 

Blackwood's Maga:(ine, criticism by 
Christopher North of Tennyson's 
poem " To the Owl," 4, 23 

Bleibtreu, Herr, 299-301 

Boucher, M. Leon, 276-281 

Boxley, home of the Tennysons, 53 

Bradley, Dean, 142 

" Bridesmaid, The," 51 

" Britons, Guard your Own," 128 

" Brook," the, not the Somersby stream, 
6 

Brooke, Stopford, criticism of Poems by 
Two Brothers, 9, 10, 18; on " The 
Palace of Art," 30 ; on " The Miller's 
Daughter," 32 ; description of Cleve- 
don Church, }6 ; criticism of Tenny- 
son's attitude toward social questions, 
61 , 64 ; on Tennyson's attitude toward 
the woman question, 92, 119; on 
Enoch Arden, 197; on Tennyson's 
description of the sea, 198 

Brooks, Phillips, 1 34 

Browning, Mrs., 67, 68, 69 ; criticism of 
Tennyson in The New Spirit of the 
Age, 70 ; on The Princess, 83, 84, 
115, 117; on Maud, 161, 162 

Browning, Robert, 48. 114, 117, 120, 
131, 217, 250, 274, 276 

Bulwer, Edward Lytton, 80 

Byron, Tennyson's boyish love of, 5 ; 
dislike of Cambridge, 12 ; subject of 
debate, 16, 49, 117, 214, 258 



305 



3o6 



lln&ey^ 



Cambridge, Charles and Alfred entered, 
lo ; disliked by poets, 1 1 ; Tennyson's 
indifference to, 12; character of its 
teaching, 12; Carlyle's defence of, 13, 
14 ; Tennyson's life at, 15-26 ; Ten- 
nyson's departure from, 27 ; described 
in In Memoriam, 41, 42 

Cambridge Union, 16 

Cameron, Henry, 132 

Cameron, Mr., 145 

Cameron, Mrs., 133, 143, 146-150 

Carlyle, Thomas, description of Tenny- 
son, 58, 59, 74, 77, 1 20 

Catholic World, The, 227 

" Charge of the Light Brigade, The," 124, 
125 

Christianity, Tennyson's reverence for, 

45 

Church, Professor, description of Som- 
ersby brook, 6 ; description of the 
Rev. J. Waite, Master of Louth Gram- 
mar School, 7, 137, 138 

" Churchwarden and the Curate, The," 
207-21 1 

" Claribel," 261 

Clevedon Church, burial-place of Arthur 
Hallam, 35 ; Stopford Brooke's de- 
scription of, "^6 

Cock Tavern, the, 53, 54, 55 

Coleridge, influence over Cambridge, 1 7, 
48, 60, 70, 1 1 7, 269 

Cooper, Thomas, conversation with 
Wordsworth concerning Tennyson, 

57 

Cornwall, 1 10 

Cowley, 258 

Criticisms, in The Literary Chronicle 
and IVeekly Review, 9 ; by Stopford 
Brooke, 9, 10, 18 ; oi Poems, Chiefly 
Lyrical, in the IVestminster Review, 
20 ; in The Englishman's Magazine, 
22 ; in Blackwood's, 23; of " The 1 833 
volume," by E. C. Stedman, 28 ; by 
A. C. Swinburne, 28 ; by John Ster- 
ling, 30 ; by Mr. Bayne, 31 ; by Stop- 
ford Brooke, 32 ; by Lockhart, 33, 34 ; 



of In Memoriam, by M. Taine, 37 ; 
by Swinburne, 38 ; by E. C. Stedman, 
39 ; by Dr. Van Dyke, 40 ; of patri- 
otic poems, by Stopford Brooke, 61 ; 
by Dr. Van Dyke, 62 ; of Nature 
Poetry, by Stopford Brooke, 64 ; by 
Swinburne, 66 \ of 1842 volume, by 
Miss Barrett, 70 ; by Charles Sumner, 
7 1 ; of The Princess, by Mrs. Brown- 
ing, 83 ; by James Russell Lowell, 84- 
89 ; of Tennyson's humour, by Mr. 
Traill, 90 ; by Emerson, 109 ; of 
Laureate Poems, by Swinburne, 127, 
128 ; by Prof. Dowden, 131 ; of 
Maud, by Mr. Gladstone, 159, 160; 
by Mrs. Browning, 162 ; of the 
Pre-Raphaelite illustrations, by y^rt 
Journal, 163 ; by Mr. Layard, 166- 
1 70 ; of Idylls of the King, by Mr. 
Gladstone, 178; by Richard Hutton, 
185 ; by Swinburne, 186 ; by Glad- 
stone, 189 ; by J. R. Lowell, 190 ; of 
Enoch Arden, by Walter Bagehot, 
194 ; by Stopford Brooke, 197 ; by 
Atlantic Monthly, 196, 197 ; of " The 
Northern Farmer," in the IVestminster 
Review, 200-204; of "The Church- 
warden and the Curate " in Westmin- 
ster Review, 208-2 10; oi Queen Mary, 
by Henry James, 214 ; in Quarterly 
Review, 2 1 5-2 1 7 ; by Richard Hutton, 
218 ; of Becket, in Catholic World, 
227-229 ; in the Academy, 230 ; of 
Tennyson's popularity, in the Speaker, 
255, 256 ; by Mr. Traill, 256 ; by 
Edmund Gosse, 257, 258, 259, 260 ; 
of early poetry in Revue des Deux 
Mondes, by M. Forgues, 269, 270 ; 
by M. Milsand, 271 ; by M. Taine, 
271 

Crossing the Bar, quotation from, 248- 
252 

Cup, The, 224 



D 



Dawson, Mr., on parallel passages, 96 
" Day-Dreams," 300 



Unbey^ 



307 



Death, Tennyson's, 248-250 
"Defence of Lucknow, The," 128 
Demeter, and Other Poems, 247 
Dickens, 74, 90, 255, 270 
Dowden, Professor, criticism, 131 
Dramas, the, 213-234 
" Dreamer, The," 261 
"Dream of Fair Women, A," 164, 

274 
Dryden, unfriendly to Cambridge, 1 1 ; 

quotation from, 103 ; as Laureate, 

1 16, 250, 258 
" Dying Swan, The," 299 



Edinburgh Magazine, the, 72 

Eliot, George, 218 

Emerson, R. W., admiration of Tenny- 
son, 71 ; description of London so- 
ciety, 74 ; description of Tennyson, 
75, 76, 107 ; estimate of Tennyson in 
English Traits, 109, 120 

Engels, Herr, criticism, 129, 301 

"England and America in 1782," 62, 
129 

Englishman's Magazine, the, criticism 
oi Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, 22, 23 

"Enid," 184 

Enoch Arden, 193-200, 211, 273, 275, 
281, 300 

Examiner, the, 124 



Falcon, The, 224 

Farringford, purchase of, 114, 132-150, 
151, 236 

Fauvel, M., translation of Maud, 157, 
158 

Fields, Mrs., description of Lady Tenny- 
son, 1 13 

Fields, Mr., Mrs. Cameron's letter to, 150 

Filon, M., in the Revue des Deux 
Mondes, 281-299 

FitzGerald, Edward, letter to Donne, 48, 
56 ; on The Princess, 82 ; on Tenny- 
son's humour, 90 ; Tennyson's visit 
to, 245, 246 



Foresters, The, 232-234 

Forgues, M., on Tennyson's early poetry, 

269-271 
Forster, John, 80 
Fox, Caroline, account of Tennyson in 

Cornwall, 1 10, 175 
France, Tennyson's attitude toward, 

128, 129 
Freshwater, 135, 137 
Froude, James Anthony, 215, 219-221, 

280. 281 



" Gardener's Daughter, The," 57, 299 

Garibaldi, 142, 236 

Gautier, Theophile, 120 

Germ, the, 120 

Gladstone, Wm. Ewart, 145 ; criticism 
of Maud, 158-160 ; review of Idylls 
of the King, 177, 189, 196, 237, 240; 
on Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, 
240, 241 

"Godiva," 71, 72, 75 

Goethe, 217 

"Golden Year, The," 81 

Gosse, Edmund, on Tennyson's popu- 
larity, 257 

H 

Hales, Professor, account of Louth Gram- 
mar School, 7 

Hallam, Arthur, speaks in debate be- 
tween Cambridge Union and Oxford 
Literary Club, i6; criticism in Eng- 
lishman's Magazine of Poems, Chiefly 
Lyrical, 22, 23 ; friendship with Ten- 
nyson, 24-26 ; death of, 35 ; burial- 
place of, 35, •i,^^ inspiration of In 
Memoriam, 37 

Hamerton, Philip Gilbert, 267 

Hamlet, Maud compared to, 153-155 

"Hands All Round," 128 

Harold, 222 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 75, 113, 114, 
120 

Hawthorne, Mrs., description of Tenny- 
son and his wife, 113-115 



3o8 



Unbey. 



High Beach, home of the Tennysons, 53 
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, on recurrent 

ideas, 104 
Holywell Glen, 5 
Homer, 65 
Home, R. H., 69 

Hugo, Victor, 120; sonnet on, 129 
Hume, David, 215-217 
Humility, Tennyson's, 264, 265 
Humour, Tennyson's, 86, 89, 90, 91 
Hunt, Holman, 163, 164, 166, 168, 175 
Hunt, Leigh, 74, 116 
Hutton, Richard, on Idjylls of the King, 

185-189 



Ibsen, 121, 213 

"Idyl of Dora," 57 

Idylls of the King, 176-192, 214, 260, 
271, 274, 277, 281, 301, 304 

In Memoriam, stanzas on the * ' Tv^^elve 
Apostles," 15, 37; Taine's criticism 
of, 37 ; Sv^inburne's criticism of, 38, 
39 ; Stedman's opinion of, 39 ; Van 
Dyke's opinion of, 40 ; autobiograph- 
ical interest of, 41-43 ; religious senti- 
ment of, 44, 45 ; first published, 111; 
114, 118, 193, 256, 260, 271, 303 

Irving, Henry, 218, 229, 230, 231 



J 



Jackson, J., Tennyson's first publisher, 8 
James, Henry, article on Queen Mary, 

213, 214, 265 
Jebb, Professor, 142, 223, 234 
Johnson, Dr., 1 16 
Jonson, Ben, 1 16 
Jowett, Benjamin, 126, 142 



K 



Keats, John, 49, 58, 105, 117, 258, 261, 

269 
Keepsake, the, 49 
Kingsley, Charles, on the songs in The 

Princess, 92, 93 
Kipling, Rudyard, 199, 259 



Knowles, Sheridan, 78 
Krehbiel, Mr., on Tennyson's knowledge 
of music, 156 



L, the letter, 93-95 

"Lady Clare," 71 

"Lady of Shalott," 31, 32 ; comment 
by Stopford Brooke, 32, 75 ; illustra- 
tion to, 165, 172, 173, 181 

Landor, V;^ alter Savage, 67, 72, 73, 120 

" Launcelot and Elaine," 181-184 

Laureate Poems, 126, 128, 129, 130 

Laureateship, 116-131 

Layard, Mr., on the Pre-Raphaelite 
illustrations, 166-175 

Lay of the Last Minstrel, parallelism 
with song in The Princess, 102 

Leopardi, verses from, 249 

Lime walk, Cambridge, described in In 
Memoriam, 42 

"Lincolnshire," i, 200, 204, 210 

Literary Chronicle and Weekly Re- 
view, The, notice of Poems by Two 
Brothers, 9 

LocksJey Hall, 71, 78, 240, 255, 303; 
Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, 
240, 242 

Longfellow, H. W., 120, 142, 250 

" Lord of Burleigh, The," 164 

Louth, Tennyson's schooling at, 6, 8 ; 
first book published at, 8 ; Louth 
Grammar School, Prof. Hales's account 
of, 7 

Love's Labour' s Lost, 82 

Lowell, James Russell, 70, 79 ; on The 
Princess, 84-8^ ; on Milton, 100, 101 ; 
letter from Charles S. Vv^heeler, 108, 
109, 120 ; on Idylls of the King, 190, 
191 ; quotation from Biglow Papers, 
204, 261 

" Lucretius," 300 

M 

Mabinogion, 184 

Mablethorpe, description of, 8, 9 

McCarthy, Justin, 124 



Unbey, 



309 



Macaulay, 120 

Malory, Thomas, 180-184, 1^9 

Mann, Dr., on Maud, 162 

Marriage, Tennyson's, 112 

Martineau, Harriet^ 79 

Massachusetts Quarterly, the, Lowell's 
review in, 84-89 

Maud, derived from an early poem, 50 ; 
compared to verses by Dryden, 103, 
105, 113, 135, 151-167; French 
translation of, 157, 158, 179, 193, 
213, 236, 255, 271,303^ 

Maurice, F. D., at Cambridge, 17 ; let- 
ter from, 140, 141 

'* May Queen, The," 304 

Memoir, the, quotation from, 95, 112, 
143, 193, 217, 227, 236, 237 ; descrip- 
tion of, 262-264 

" Merlin and the Gleam," 247, 248 

Millais, John, 142, 163, 164, 166, 167, 
170-172 

Milnes, Richard Monckton, member of 
the " Twelve Apostles," 15 ; descrip- 
tion of debate between Oxford and 
Cambridge literary societies, 16, 49, 

97 
Milsand, M., on Tennyson's poetry, 271 
Milton, disliked Cambridge, 11, 58, 62 ; 

Lowell's essay on, 100, 101, 131 
Mitford, Mary Russell, on The Princess, 

83, 112 
Montegut, M,, in Revue des Deux 

Mondes, 273-276 
Montenegro, Sonnet on, 128 
" Morte d' Arthur," 67, 70, 108, 113, 

260, 274 
Moxon, Edward, 56, 163, 174 
Murray, Fairfax, on illustration by Ros- 

setti, 169 
Music, Tennyson's knowledge of, 156 
Musset, Alfred de, 120, 261, 266, 271, 

273 



N 



Nature, Tennyson's attitude toward, 64, 

65, 66, 155, 156, 300 
Newman, J. H., 17 



New Spirit of the Age, The, criticism of 
Tennyson by Mrs. Browning in, 69, 70 
" New Timon and the Poets, The," 80 
Nicholas, St., article in, 143 
"Northern Cobbler, The," 212 
" Northern Farmer," 90, 200-207, 275 



O'Connor, Mr., article in Century, 150 
"Ode on the Death of the Duke of 

Wellington," compared with Scott's 

IVoodstock, 102, 126 
"Ode to Memory," 6 
"CEnone," 67, 68, 70, 71 
Oxford, debate between literary clubs of 

Oxford and Cambridge, 1 6 ; conferred 

on Tennyson the degree of D.C.L., 

«45 

P 

"Palace of Art, The," 29; Sterling's 
criticism of, 30 ; Stopford Brooke's 
criticism of, 30 ; Bayne's comparison 
of, with Poe's poem, 31 

Parallel Passages, 96 ; Tennyson's letter 
on the subject of, 96, 97, 98, 99 ; 
Lowell's comment upon, 100 ; in 
"The Voice and the Peak," and 
Chinese verses, 97, 101 

"Passing of Arthur, The," 185 

Pater, Walter, on "Style," 47 

Patmore, Coventry, 75, 112 

Patriotism, 130, 131 

Peel, Sir Robert, 77, 78 

Peerage, 238 

Pension, Tennyson's, 77, 78, 79 

Pessimism, Tennyson's, 242 

Pickford, Mr., 249 

Poe, Edgar Allan, compared with Tenny- 
son, 31, 70 

Poems hy Alfred Tennyson, 56 

Poems hy Two Brothers, Tennyson's 
earliest publication, 8, 9, 10 

Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, publication of^ 
20 ; criticism of, in Westminster Re- 
view, 20, 2 1 ; criticism of, in English- 
man's Magazine, 22 ; criticism of, in 
Blackwood's, 23 



3IO 



llnbey^ 



Poetry, the future of English, 258, 259, 

260 
Poland, Sonnet on, 127 
Pope, 258 

Portraits, Tennyson's, 253 
" Pre-Raphaelites, The," 163-175 
Princess, The, 74, 81-83, '07, 118, 127, 

151, 255, 260, 271, 274 
Promise of May, The, 231 
Publication, in America, 109 



Quarterly Review, The, 33, 34, 72, 215- 

217 
Queen Mary, 214-222, 276-281 
Queen Victoria^ 237, 263 



Rasselas, 81 

Reading, Tennyson's, 161 

" Recollections of the Arabian Nights," 
.65 

Rectory, The, Tennyson's early home, 2, 
3, 27 

Religion, Tennyson's, 44 

"Revenge, The," 246 

"Riflemen, Form ! " 123, 138 

Ritchie, Mrs., quoted, 132, 134, 148 

"Rizpah," 244 

Rogers, Samuel, 74, 116 

Rose Crescent, lodgings of the Tenny- 
son brothers, 15 

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 120 ; sketch of 
Tennyson, 163, 165 ; as an illustrator, 
166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 174 

Ruskin, John, 64, 65, 155 



" S," the letter, 95 

"St. Agnes' Eve," Illustration to, 170; 

German translation of, 171 
Saturday Review, The, 23 1 , 238, 239 
Scott, Sir Walter, 65 ; quotation from 

Lay of the Last Minstrel, 1 02 ; IVood- 

stock, 102, 214 
Scribner's Magazine, quotation trom, 

95 



Sea, Tennyson's descriptions of, 198, 

199 
" Sea Dreams," 275 
Selborne, the Earl of, 229 
Sellwood, Emily, see Lady Tennyson 
Sellwood, Louisa, 51 
Shelley, 16, 49, 60, 66, 96, 99, 117, 151, 

152,258 
Shenstone, confused by Oxonians with 

Shelley, 16 
Shiplake church, description of, 112 
Silent Voices, The, 252 
Simeon, Sir John, 142 
" Simeon Stylites," 300 
"Sisters, The," 270 
"Skipping Rope, The," 90 
Somersby, 2, 4, 27, 46, 51, 92-96, 102, 

202 
Somersby Brook, 5, 6 
Somersby Church, 2, 4, 5 
Southey, Robert, as Laureate, 1 16 
Spanish Gypsy, The, 2 1 7 
Spanish Refugees, Carlyle's description 

of, 18 ; Tennyson's expedition in aid 

of, 19 
Speaker, the, on Tennyson's influence, 

254-257 
Spectator, the, 143; on French transla- 
tion of Maud, 157, 158, 238; on 

Tennyson's funeral, 250-252 
Spedding, James, 16, 54, 55, 72, 119, 

218, 243 
Stedman, E. C, on In Memoriam, 39 
Sterling Club, the, 76 
Sterling, John, 16, 17, 29, 72 ; Carlyle's 

Life of, 1 20 
Studies, Tennyson's, 46, 47 
Sumner, Charles, letter to Milnes, 7 1 
Surrey, 236 
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, on the 

"Twelve Apostles," 15, 38, 39, 50, 

65, 66, 120-128, 178-189, 192, 217, 

244, 246, 260, 277 
Symonds, John Addington, 160, 263 



Taine, Hippolyte, on In Memoriam, 37, 
102 ; on Tennyson's poetry, 272, 273 



ln&ey» 



311 



•'Talking Oak, The," 164 

Taylor, Bayard, at Farringford, 135 

Taylor, Sir Henry, 106, 118, 143, 146, 
«47, M9, 243 

Tennyson, Alfred, birth, 2 ; early home, 
2, 3, 27 ; schooling at Louth, 6, 8 ; 
first book published, 8; first publisher, 
8; life at Cambridge, 15-26; expe- 
dition in aid of Spanish refugees, 19 ; 
compared with Poe, 31, 70; religion, 
44 ; reverence for Christianity, 45 ; 
studies, 46 ; home at High Beach, 53; 
home at Boxley, 53 ; poems, 56 ,- 
patriotism, 62; sympathy with Ameri- 
cans, 62, 70, 107, 120, 129 ; attitude 
toward Nature, 64, 155, 300; pension, 
77 ; humour, 89 ; letter on Parallel 
Passages, 96 ; letter to Charles S. 
Wheeler, 107-109; marriage, 112; 
home at Twickenham, 114; degree of 
D.CL. from Oxford, 145 ; knowledge 
of music, 156; attitude toward war, 
158 ; reading, 161 ; interest in art, 
175; descriptions of the sea, 198; 
pessimism, 242 ; portraits, 253 ; visit 
to Edward FitzGerald, 245 ; popu- 
larity, 256 ; humility, 264, 265 ; death, 
248-250 

Tennyson, Charles, 8 ; went to Cam- 
bridge with Alfred, 10 

Tennyson, Frederick, 51 

Tennyson, the Rev. Geo. Clayton, 2, 

52, 53 
Tennyson, Mrs., 2 
Tennyson, Hallam, 112, 113 
Tennyson, Lady, 51, 76, 1 12-1 16, 134, 

2^6, 252 
Tennyson, Lionel, 113, 236 
Thackeray, not in Tennyson's set at 

college, 15 ; parody on " Timbuc- 

too," 20, 74, 90, 120, 255, 263 
"The i8?3 Volume," 28; Mr. Sted- 

man's criticism of, 28 ; Swinburne's 

comment upon, 28, 29 ; criticism of, in 

The Quarterly Review, 33 
" Third of February, 1852," 127, 129 
Thoreau, Henry D., 76, 107 
Ticknor, W. D., 109 



" Timbuctoo," 19 ; parody of, by Thack- 
eray, 20 

Tiresias, and Other Poems, 176, 245, 
246 

Traill, H. D., on Tennyson's humour, 
89, 90, 91, 92 ; on Tennyson's popu- 
larity, 256 

Trench, Richard, 15 

Trumpington Street, lodgings of the 
Tennyson brothers, 15 

Tunbridge Wells, home of the Tenny- 
sons, ^j, 

"Twelve Apostles" the, a society at 
Cambridge, 15 ; Swinburne's defini- 
tion of, 15 ; members of, 15, 16 

Twickenham, Tennyson's home, 114 

"Two Voices," 69 

Tyndall, Professor, 142 

U 
" Ulysses," 56, 67, 78, 260, 261, 300 
V 

Van Dyke, Dr., on Tennyson's patriot- 
ism, 62 

Vanity Fair, 1 20 

" Vastness," 45, 246 

Vere, Aubrey de, 74 ; his St. Thomas 
of Canterbury, 227 

"Vision of Sin," 300 

W 

Wace, Walter, 81 

Wales, Prince of, 142 

War, Tennyson's attitude toward, 158 ; 
Gladstone's description of, 159 

Ward, W. G., on Becket, 227 

Watson, Wm., 259 

Watts, Theodore, 253 

Waugh, Arthur, description of Tenny- 
son's mother, 2 ; description of the 
Cock Tavern, 54 

Wellington, the Duke of, 123 

IVestminster Review, the, article on 
" Northern Farmer," 200-204 ; article 
on " The Churchwarden and the 
Curate," 208-210 



12 



Inbey, 



Wheeler, Charles S., letter from Tenny- 
son to, 107-109 

Whittier, J. G., 120 

"Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue,' 
54, 60, 90 

" Woman Question," 81, 92 



IVoodstock, parallelism with '•' Ode on 
the Duke of Wellington," 102, 103 

Woolner, 142, 195 

Wordsworth, Wm., 17, 48, 57, 60, 63, 
67, 72, 74, 96 ; death of, 116, 117, 
258 




3i|77-t4. 



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